Rage

CHAPTER 18

Nina Balquin was listed on Bluebell Avenue in North Hollywood.

Not far from the site of her daughter’s suicide. Or the Buy-Rite mall, or the park where her granddaughter had been taken to be murdered.

A short drive, also, to the Daneys’ house in Van Nuys.

But for Barnett Malley’s escape to rural solitude, the case had tossed a narrow net.

Milo got the number, spoke briefly, finished with, “Thanks, ma’am, will do.”

“Off we go,” he said. “She’s surprised that I want to talk to her about Barnett, not upset. Just the opposite, she’s lonely as hell.”

“You picked that up in a thirty-second conversation?”

“I didn’t pick up anything,” he said. “She came right out with it. ‘I’m a lonely woman, Lieutenant. Any company would be welcome.’ ”

The house was a cantaloupe orange one-story ranch on a bright, hot street. The lawn was green pebbles. A garden hose coiled loosely near the front steps, maybe for watering the elephant’s ears that covered half the front wall. This sisal doormat read DJB over a heraldic crest. The bell chimed do-re-mi.

The woman who opened the door was petite, of indeterminate middle age, with narrow blue eyes and a glossy tension around the cheekbones that trumpeted the virtues of surgical steel. She wore a fitted orange crepe blouse over black leggings and red Chinatown slippers embroidered with dragons. Her brown hair was snipped boy-short with feathery sideburns that curled forward. Her right hand gripped a remote control. A cigarette in her left dribbled smoke that trailed downward and dissolved before it reached her knee.

She tucked the remote under her arm. “Lieutenant? That didn’t take long. I’m Nina.” Her mouth smiled but the surrounding glassy skin didn’t cooperate and the expression was robbed of emotional content.

The house had no entry foyer and we stepped directly into a paneled room topped by a slanted beamed ceiling. All the wood was pickled oak, yellowed by decades. The carpet was rust plush flecked with blue, the furniture beige, tightly upholstered and newish, as if it had been plucked intact from a showroom. A paneled wet bar housed glasses and bottles and a flat-screen TV sat on the brown tile counter. The set was on. Courtroom dispute, the sound muted- people mouthing aggression; a bald, scowling judge wielding a gavel in a way that couldn’t escape Freudian theory.

Nina Balquin said, “Love that stuff, it’s nice to see idiots get what they’ve got coming.” Aiming her remote, she switched off. “Drinks, gentlemen?”

“No, thanks.”

“It got kind of warm outside.”

“We’re fine, ma’am.”

“Well, I’m having.” She walked to the bar and poured herself something clear from a chrome pitcher. “Make yourselves comfortable.”

Milo and I sat on one of the beige sofas. The fabric was coarse and pebbly and I felt the bumps against the backs of my legs. Nina Balquin spent a long time adding ice to her drink. I noticed a tremor in her hands. Milo was taking in the room and I did the same.

A few family photos hung lopsided on a rear wall, too distant to make out. Sliding glass doors exposed a small rectangular swimming pool. Clumps of leaves and grit floated on greenish water. Rims of concrete decking too narrow for seating comprised the rest of the backyard.

Walk out, get wet, come back in.

Nina Balquin settled perpendicular to us and sipped her drink. “I know, it’s a mess, I don’t swim. Never used Barnett for the pool. Maybe I should’ve. He could’ve been good for one thing.” She drank some more.

Milo said, “You’re not fond of Barnett.”

“Can’t stand his guts. Because of how he treated Lara. And me. Why are you asking about him?”

“How he treated Lara before Kristal’s murder or after?”

At the mention of her granddaughter, Balquin flinched. “You ask, I answer? Fine, but just tell me one thing: Is the bastard in some kind of trouble?”

“It’s possible.”

Balquin nodded. “The answer is he was rotten to Lara before and after. She met him at a rodeo- can you believe that? She went to good schools, her father was a dentist. The plan was she was supposed to go to the U. But her grades went to hell in high school. Still, there was Plan Two, Valley College. So what does she do after graduating? Gets a job at a dude ranch in Ojai and meets Cowboy Buckaroo and the next thing I know she’s calling to inform me they’re married.”

She gulped her drink, swished liquid in her mouth, swallowed, stuck out her tongue. “Lara was eighteen, he was twenty-four. She watches him rope horses or doggies or whatever they rope and suddenly the two of them are at some tacky little drive-through chapel in Vegas. Her father could’ve… killed them.” She smiled uneasily. “To use an expression.”

Milo said, “Can’t blame him for being upset.”

“Ralph was furious. Who wouldn’t be? But he never said a thing to Lara, kept it all inside. A year later he was diagnosed with stomach cancer, and four months after that he was gone.” She glanced back at the dirty pool. “Excuse me, not gone. Dead. At the time he was diagnosed we were in escrow on another house, Encino, south of the boulevard, gorgeous, huge. Thank God Ralph had decent life insurance.”

“Does Lara have siblings?” I said, still trying to make out the photos.

“My oldest, Mark, is a C.P.A. up in Los Gatos, used to be comptroller for a dot-com, he’s doing fantastic as an independent consultant. Sandy, the baby, is in grad school at the University of Minnesota. Sociology. It’s kind of endless for her- school; she already has one master’s. But she never gave me a lick of trouble.”

She took an ice cube in her mouth, sloshed it, crushed it. “Lara was the wild one. It’s only now I’m able to get in touch with how pissed-off I am at her.”

“For marrying Barnett?”

“For that, for everything- for killing herself.” Her hand began to shake and she placed her rattling glass on an end table. “My therapist told me suicide’s the ultimate aggressive act. Lara didn’t need to do that, she really didn’t. She could have talked to someone. I told her to talk to someone.”

“Get some therapy,” said Milo.

“I’m a big fan of therapy.” She picked up the glass. “Therapy and Tanqueray and tonic and Prozac.”

I said, “So Lara was the rebellious one.”

“Even when she was little, you’d tell her black, she’d say white. In high school, she got in with a bad crowd- that’s what messed up her grades. Of the three, she was the smartest, all she had to do was a little work. Instead, she marries him. Vegas, for God’s sake. It was like a bad movie. He was- have you ever seen his teeth?”

During the few seconds Malley had faced us, he had never opened his mouth.

Milo said, “Not in good shape?”

“Trailer trash teeth,” said Nina Balquin. “You can imagine what Ralph thought of that.” Illustrating the contrast, she flashed a full set of porcelain jackets. “He was lowlife, didn’t have a family.”

“No family at all?”

“Every time I asked him about where he grew up, who his parents were, he changed the subject. I mean, here was this new person in our lives, doesn’t it seem reasonable to ask? Forget it. Strong and silent. Except he wasn’t strong enough to make a decent living.”

She drained her glass, steadied one hand with the other. “We’re an educated, sophisticated family- I have a degree in design and my husband was one of the best endodontists in the Valley. So who walks in? The Beverly Hillbilly.”

“Lara met him at a dude ranch,” said Milo.

“Lara’s earth-shattering summer job.” Balquin grimaced. “Here she never made up her bed, but there she could clean rooms for minimum wage. She claimed she wanted to earn her own money so she could buy a more expensive car than Ralph wanted to get for her.”

“Claimed?”

“She quit after two weeks to run off to Vegas with him. Never got any kind of car until we bought her a used Taurus. She was just rebelling by going to Ojai, like every other time.”

“You said Barnett was working some kind of traveling rodeo?”

“For all I know he put stars in my daughter’s eyes with rope tricks. I’m allergic to horses… out of the blue she’s married, informing me she wants lots of babies. Not just babies, lots of babies. I said who’s going to pay for all those babies, and she had a ready answer. Cowboy Buckaroo was putting away his chaps and spurs, whatever, and getting himself a real job.”

Balquin snorted. “Like I was supposed to stand and applaud. What was this great career? Working for a pool-cleaning service.”

I said, “They were married a while before they had Kristal.”

“Seven years,” said Balquin. “Which was fine with me. I figured maybe Lara was finally thinking straight, doing some financial planning. She got herself a job- not a great one, supermarket cashier at Vons. And Cowboy bought himself some chlorine and went out on his own.”

“You see them much?”

“Hardly at all. Then one day Lara dropped in, nervous, sheepish. I knew she wanted something. What she wanted was money for fertility treatment. Turns out they’d been trying for years. She said she’d gotten pregnant a few times but miscarried. Then nothing. Her doctor was thinking some sort of incompatibility. I knew for her to show up she’d have to want something.”

I said, “Why was there so little contact?”

“Because that’s what they wanted. We invited them to every family affair but they never showed up. At the time, I assumed that was his doing, but now I’m not sure. Because my therapist says I need to confront the possibility of Lara’s complicity in a destructive dyad. As part of the process.”

“The process?” said Milo.

“The healing process,” said Balquin. “Getting my act together. I have a chemical imbalance that affects my moods but I also need to take personal responsibility for how I react to stressful situations. My new therapist gets what loss is all about and she brought me to the point where I can take the gloves off when it comes to Lara. That’s why your call was so perfect. After you called, I told my therapist we’d be talking. She thought it was karma.”

Milo nodded, crossed his legs. “Did you give Lara the money for treatment?”

“The two of them had no health insurance. I’m not sure if fertility’s even covered by insurance. I felt sorry for her, knew it was tough for her to come with her hand out. I told her I’d ask her father and she thanked me. Actually hugged me.”

Balquin’s eyes fluttered. She got up and refilled her glass. “I can get you guys something soft.”

“We’re really okay, ma’am. So your husband agreed to pay for the fertility treatments?”

“Ten thousand dollars’ worth. First he said no way, then of course, he gave in. Ralph was a big softie. Lara cashed the check and that was the last I heard about it. Then back to the same old routine, not returning my calls. My therapist says I have to confront the possibility that she used me.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s possible they never paid the doctor.”

“Why would you suspect that, ma’am?”

Balquin’s hand whitened around her glass. “I carried Lara for nine months and sometimes I miss her so much I can’t stand to think about it. But I need to be objective for my own mental health. I always suspected those two spent the money on something else because soon after we gave it to them, they moved to a bigger place and there was still no baby. Lara said Barnett needed space for his piano. I thought what a waste, all he played was country-western songs and not very well. Kristal didn’t arrive until years later- when Lara was twenty-six.”

“That must have been something,” I said.

“Kristal?” She blinked some more. “A cutie, a beauty. From the little I saw of her. Here I was, a grandma, and I never got to see my grandchild. Lara had choices but I know he had a role in it. He isolated her.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “That man never once uttered a pleasant boo-hoo to any of us. Despite our feelings about the marriage, we tried to be nice. When they got back from Vegas we threw them a little party, over at the Sportsman’s Lodge. The invitation said ‘Business attire.’ He came in dirty jeans and one of those cowboy shirts- with the snaps on it. His hair was all long and unkempt- my Ralph was a real dapper guy, you can imagine. Lara used to love dressing up, but not anymore. She wore jeans just as filthy as his and a cheap-looking little halter tank top.”

She shook her head. “It was embarrassing. But that was Lara. Always keeping things lively.”

“Ma’am,” said Milo, “would it be too painful to talk about the suicide?”

Nina Balquin’s eyes floated upward. “If I said yes, would you drop it?”

“Of course.”

“Well, it is painful, but I don’t want you to drop it. Because it wasn’t my fault, no matter what anyone says. Lara made choices her whole life, then she ended her life with a horrible, stupid, rotten choice.”

“Who says it’s your fault?” I said.

“No one,” she said. “And everyone, implicitly. Lose a child to an accident or an illness, everyone feels sorry for you. Lose a child to suicide and people look at you as if you were the most horrible parent in the world.”

“How did Barnett react to the suicide?”

“I wouldn’t know, we never spoke about it.” Her eyes clenched and opened. “He had Lara cremated, never had the decency to have a service. No funeral, no memorial. He cheated me- the bastard. Can’t you tell me what he’s suspected of? Is it something to do with drugs?”

Milo said, “Barnett used drugs?”

“Both of them smoked pot. Maybe that’s why Lara couldn’t get pregnant- isn’t that supposed to do something to your ovaries or whatever?”

“How do you know about their drug usage?”

“I know the signs, Detective. Lara was a pothead when she was in high school. I never saw any evidence she’d stopped.”

“The bad crowd she fell in with,” I said.

“Bunch of spoiled kids,” she said. “Driving around in their parents BMWs, booming that music and pretending they were ghetto. Neither of my other two went for that nonsense.”

“You figure Lara continued using after she was married.”

“I know she did. The few times I visited their apartment- the few times they let me in- everything was a mess and you could smell it in the air.”

Milo said, “Did they ever use anything stronger than marijuana?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me.” Balquin eyed him. “So this is about drugs. Is Barnett pushing?”

“Have you known him to sell drugs?”

“No, but I’m being logical. Don’t users become pushers to pay for their habit? And all those guns he keeps- Lara wasn’t raised with that, we never had so much as a BB gun in our home. All of a sudden they’ve got rifles, pistols, horrible stuff. He kept them out in the open, in a wooden case- the way sophisticated people display books. If you’re not doing something shady, why do you need all those guns?”

“Ever ask him?”

“I mentioned it to Lara. She told me to mind my own business.”

I looked for bookshelves in her front room. Nothing but pickled oak paneling and the photos on the back wall.

She said, “Lara used one of his guns to shoot herself. I hope he’s happy.” Her hands tightened into fists. “If he is a pusher, I hope you catch him and put him away forever. Because the last thing my daughter needed was another bad influence.”

She scraped an incisor with a fingernail, raised her glass to her lips, and drank slowly but steadily. Finished off the refill without taking a breath.

Milo said, “Is there anything else you’d like to tell us, ma’am?”

“I shouldn’t say this but… oh, what the hell, she’s gone and so is Kristal and I need to concentrate on rebuilding my own life.” She tightened her face again, held the tension so long that even the refashioned muscles of her cheeks and chin gave way.

“I always wondered if drugs had something to do with Lara losing sight of Kristal. She insisted it was only for a second, the store was crowded and she turned her head and she was gone. But doesn’t dope slow your reflexes?”

Milo uncrossed his legs. He took his pad out but didn’t write.

Nina Balquin said, “It’s a terrible thing to say about your own child, but how else can you explain it? I raised three kids, and as a toddler Mark was a hellion, all over the place, you couldn’t get him to sit still. But I never lost him. How do you just lose a child!”

Her voice had risen to a near scream. She plopped back heavily, massaged her left temple. “Damn cluster headache… the last thing I’d want to do is blame my daughter, but objectively… maybe that’s why Lara felt guilty enough to do what she- oh, spit it out, Nina! Maybe that’s why she killed herself!”

Both her hands began shaking violently. She sat on them, shut her eyes. A high-pitched keen made its way from behind closed lips.

Milo said, “We know this is hard, ma’am. We appreciate your being so frank.”

Nina Balquin opened her eyes. Her expression was vacant.

“Insight,” she said, “can be a bitch.”

As Milo thanked her, I walked to the back of the room and looked at the photos. A couple in their thirties with two kids under ten- the accountant son and his family. A woman who resembled Lara Malley, wearing a cap and gown. Heavier face than Lara’s, red hair curling from under the mortarboard. Sister Sandy.

No image of Lara, but below her sibs hung a cheaply framed, three-by-five snapshot of Kristal. Infant photo- less than a year old from the way she needed support to sit up. Wearing a pink cowgirl dress and matching hat. Bucking broncos and cacti in the background, a tiny moon above the plains, airbrushed slick. Probably one of those kiddie-photo outlets. The kind you find in every mall.

Smiling baby girl, chubby, rosy-cheeked. Big brown eyes engaged the camera. Moisture on her chin- teething drool.

Nina Balquin said, “I got that when I dropped in on them and brought Kristal a Christmas present. They had a stack. I had to ask for that one.”

We left her standing in her doorway, new drink in her hand.

Milo drove away, muttering, “Sometimes my crazy family doesn’t seem so bad.”

I said, “Mom hates Barnett’s guts but she never considered that he might’ve murdered Lara.”

He said, “That woman’s so fragile I kept waiting to pick up shards. Wonder how she’ll cope if we find out Barnett’s a much badder guy than she imagined.”

He chose surface streets over the freeway, took Van Nuys Boulevard north and connected to Beverly Glen. As we curved through the canyon, he said, “Just like Malley’s neighborhood, huh? Except for gazillion-dollar houses, tennis courts, foreign cars, a lot more greenery, and no trailer parks.”

“Perfect match,” I said.

“Anything Balquin say illuminate Malley psychologically?”

“If she’s credible, he isolated Lara from her family, was closemouthed about his origins, used dope. We know the part about gun-hoarding is true. Toss in the way he reacted to us and there’s potential for ugly.”

“Don’t guys who isolate their wives also abuse them?”

“It’s a risk factor,” I said. “If Malley’s basic approach to life was us against the world, Kristal’s murder would’ve buttressed that.”

“The world’s a rotten, dangerous place so stay armed and vigilant.”

“And strike back. What interests me is Nina’s suspicion that Lara was negligent due to drugs. That’s a tough place to get to when it’s your own kid. No matter how much therapy you have.”

“There’s Barnett’s reason for blaming Lara. Even though he’s also a doper.”

“Lara was the mom,” I said. “Mothers always get blamed. After Troy and Rand were sent away, Lara and Barnett started examining their own lives. Here’s a couple who had trouble conceiving. Finally, they produce a child only to have her ripped away in the worst manner possible. Talk about stress on a relationship. Maybe tension escalated to unbearable, the wrong things got said. A history of isolation and drugs and abuse would’ve added more heat. Maybe Lara stopped putting up with the abuse.”

“Got too assertive with the cowboy.” He aimed a finger gun at the windshield. “Kapow.”

“Kapow, indeed.”