Serpentine

Chapter 2

We took Milo’s latest unmarked, an Impala the color of brussels sprouts reeking of pine disinfectant and refried beans. He generally drives with a heavy foot. This time he was ballet-light and a stickler for amber lights. That and traffic clogs from Bel Air into Beverly Hills, the Strip, and Hollywood ate up fifty-five minutes. He savored the red light at Western and Sunset before turning left and climbing the loop that begins Los Feliz Boulevard.

Los Feliz is an interesting district. Unlike the high-end homogeneity of the Westside, it’s a kernel of affluence set between the urban grit and enthusiastic crime rate of East Hollywood to the south and the Eden that’s Griffith Park to the north. One section, Laughlin Park, is gated, filled with mammoth estates, and boasts a roster of film-biz residents dating back to Cecil B. DeMille, Charlie Chaplin, W. C. Fields, and Rudolph Valentino.

Ellie Barker’s address was on Curley Court, a street neither of us knew.

Milo said, “Probably Laughlin, I’ll have to get past some rent-a-guard.” But GPS proved him wrong and we reached our goal after making an untrammeled right and cruising through a roundabout followed by four brief, open streets.

The Curley Court street sign was nearly obscured by the shaggy branches of a monumental deodar cedar, one of a score that lined the block.

Like its neighbors, the house we were looking for was generous but no mansion: two-story cream-colored Spanish from the twenties with a flat lawn leading to a low-walled courtyard.

The grass had been tended but not coddled; dandelions sprouted like stubble on a carelessly shaved face. Hugging the wall, two forty-foot coconut palms shared space with a pair of equally towering Italian cypresses. Close to an unlocked iron-scroll gate, doddering birds-of-paradise coexisted with spatulate clumps of blue agapanthus.

Old-school landscaping. It would be easy to assume a resident with a traditionalist view, maybe one preoccupied with the past. But my training’s led me to run from easy answers. For all I knew, Ellie Barker rented the place.

The courtyard was gravel-floored and empty. The front door had a Gothic peak and was equipped with a rectangular peep-window and a tarnished brass loop for a knocker.

He stood back. “Go for it.”

“What do I say, psychologist on duty?”

“Hmph, no sense of adventure.” Stepping past me, he lifted the loop and let it fall hard.

From inside the house, a woman’s voice trilled, “One second!”

“Cheerful,” he said. “Why the hell not when the universe is your toy.”

Rapid footsteps followed by a flash of pale eyes in the window, then the door swung wide.

A smiling strawberry blonde held out a hand. “Lieutenant? I’m Ellie.”

Milo pretended to not see her fingers. Ellie Barker’s smile shrank to something tentative and anxious as she dropped her hand.

Pleasant-looking woman, medium height, medium build, the hair wavy, worn to her shoulders and parted in the middle. Her clothing revealed nothing about socioeconomic status: short-sleeved white jersey top, straight-leg blue jeans, white canvas slip-ons. No jewelry other than an Apple Watch around her left wrist.

Eyes, now doubtful, were gray-green, the skin surrounding them lightly tanned and sporadically freckled. Thirty-nine and showing the advent of laugh lines and forehead furrows.

She looked at me.

Milo said, “This is Dr. Delaware, our consulting psychologist.”

I shook her hand and her smile managed to stretch but lose wattage. “Someone thinks I need help? I do but I wasn’t thinking psychotherapy.”

“Dr. Delaware helps us with unusual cases.”

“I see,” she said without conviction. “Sorry, please come in.”

She led us through a domed Mexican-tiled entry hall and into a step-down living room with a high, wood-beam ceiling. Across the hall, a smaller dining room was brightened by lead-mullioned windows. Cutting through both spaces, a Mexican-tiled staircase climbed to the second floor.

The furniture in the living room was beige and brown and sparse. Bare white walls, unused fireplace lacking tools or a screen. The rental hypothesis gained traction.

“Please, guys.” Indicating a three-seat sofa facing a bare oak coffee table. “Can I get you something to drink — Coke, tea, water? I can make some coffee?”

“Water’s fine,” said Milo, sitting near the left arm of the sofa. I took the opposite end.

“Flat or fizzy?”

“Flat.”

Ellie Barker looked at him, hoping for thaw. He studied the ceiling.

She said, “Sure, water coming up,” and hurried off past the dining room into a kitchen doorway.

I said, “Looks like the butler’s on vacation.”

“So she’s doing the regular-gal thing for our benefit.”

Ellie Barker returned with two bottles of Dasani that she handed to us before settling in a facing love seat. “Thanks so much for doing this, guys. I hope it’s not a giant hassle.”

Milo checked himself midway through an eye roll.

Not soon enough. Ellie Barker flinched.

Thrown off for the second time, she coped the same way and turned to me. “A psychologist... part of me does think it’s crazy, trying to find out after all this time. I can’t exactly pump myself up with hope. But if I don’t ever try...” She looked at the floor.

I said, “Is this the first time you’ve tried?”

“No, it’s the third time but to my mind the first two don’t count.”

“Nothing came of them?”

“Less than nothing,” she said. “Private investigators. I think they were taking advantage of me.”

“Because...”

“It was too quick. Like going through the motions. They were corporate security types, maybe that was my mistake, I don’t know.” Daring a look at Milo.

He uncapped his water bottle, took a long swig. “Was one of them Sapient Investigations?”

Green-gray eyes widened. “They were the first. How did you — do they have a reputation for taking advantage?”

“They’re among the biggest and they concentrate on California. Mostly Northern California where you’re originally from. Their emphasis is on computer fraud, industrial espionage, tax cases.”

“You researched me.”

“Just the basics.”

“I see.” One slender freckled hand tugged at the fingers of the other. “I got the referral through my executive board — my former board, I had a company that I sold.” Small smile. “You probably know that, too.”

Milo said, “What was the second outfit?”

“Cortez and Talbott. They’re down here. Costa Mesa.”

“That’s Orange County,” said Milo.

“Does that make them a poor choice?” said Ellie Barker.

“Don’t know their work, ma’am, but generally it’s best to keep things local.”

“I guess I figured with the internet, geography wasn’t relevant.” Color spread around delicate ears. “A friend of mine — an engineer at Google — recommended them, I thought they’d be close enough.”

“Did either of them give you written reports?”

“They both gave me one-page letters basically informing me nothing could be done. Plus bills for way more hours than seemed reasonable. I paid them and gave up. Or thought I had. But it kept gnawing at me — wanting to know anything.”

She stared into her lap. “I read a story in college titled ‘Man Without a Country.’ I’m a woman without a past. I have no idea who my biological father is or where I was born. My first birth certificate was when my stepfather adopted me. My mother was already dead and he put down his own mother’s birthday as mine. I’ll be forty in a few months and I realized I’d probably lived the majority of my life. If that doesn’t sound coherent and rational, I can’t help it.”

She twisted her hair. “At this point, you’re probably thinking, Oh boy, a sad case, what a waste of my time.”

Gray eyes glistened with moisture. Ellie Barker wiped them hurriedly.

Milo said, “I’ll be frank, ma’am. You may be walking up a dead-end road, I don’t know enough to say. But if the doctor and I limited ourselves to what was obviously rational, we’d both be out of work.”

Ellie Barker’s smile was immediate, grateful, pathetic. Needy kid finally getting something from surrogate dad.

“Well,” she said, “I just hope you don’t think I’m some kind of flake. I majored in business, I like to think I’m practical. I thought I was doing pretty well suppressing the whole thing. Then something weird happened. I was at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco for a fundraiser and they sat me next to a woman and she was really friendly, asking me about myself, how I’d ended up with all the old-folk donors. I was feeling pretty low because I’d just gotten Cortez and Talbott’s report so I told her about looking for my mother. She seemed sympathetic, and then the woman on the other side of her must’ve overheard because she said she had police connections. So I switched seats and talked to her — Dr. Bauer — and she said she’d see what she could do and took my number. The next day she called and said she’d contacted my state assemblyperson, Darrel Hernandez. I didn’t even know his name, politics isn’t my thing. A few days later, one of Hernandez’s assistants phoned and said she’d called your mayor and then... do you know all this?”

Milo nodded. “The wheels of justice grinding at warp speed.”

Ellie Barker flinched. “You think it was tacky? Using an advantage someone else wouldn’t have? I considered that, Lieutenant. But it’s not like everyone loses their mom at three so I rationalized it as some sort of karmic leveling-out.”

“No need to justify, ma’am. I was just commenting on... an atypical situation.”

Ellie Barker leveled her gaze at him. “You’re telling me you were pressured. I guess I should’ve figured. Does that mean we’re just going through the motions?”

No anger, just the habitual resignation of an abandoned pup.

“Ms. Barker,” said Milo, “I never just go through the motions.” He’d sat up straight, put some steel in his voice.

“So you’ll try?” said Ellie Barker. “I’d be so grateful. Even if it goes nowhere.”

He pulled out his pad. “Tell me about your mother, ma’am. Start from the beginning and tell me everything you know.”

“Sure. I do want to say thanks so much — but could you do me one teensy favor, Lieutenant?”

“What’s that?”

“I’m not used to being called ma’am.”