The Wedding Guest

Chapter 25

Serena returned with a hot-pink key on a matching chain.

Milo said, “Very cool.”

She said, “So we can see it easily.” Small smile. “Also, style’s the thing, we try to put style into everything. When we own goats on our ranch, they’re going to get groomed like show dogs. Can you guys go out by yourself? Cee’s pretty sad, I want to stay here for her.”

The garage’s rear door was approached via a narrow strip where the fencing was blanketed by clematis. Two plastic garbage cans sat a few feet away. Milo gloved up and checked them. Force of habit.

He headed for the door.

I said, “Nothing interesting.”

“Gluten-free imitation something and enough bottled water to hydrate South Africa.”

He inserted the key. I stood back as he stepped inside.

Seconds later: “C’mon in.”

Suzanne “Kimbee” DaCosta’s hundred bucks a month had bought her two hundred square feet of whitewashed drywall, plywood ceiling, and concrete floor glossed by translucent spray-on coating. Where the gloss wasn’t covered by a fake Persian rug, structural cracks were suspended, like gristle in aspic.

One corner was hidden by two walls of plastic shower curtains. Behind the curtains were a prefab shower, a mirrored medicine cabinet bottomed by a glass shelf, a small sink, and a toilet. A freestanding full-length mirror took up the opposite corner. A red silk scarf had been draped over one side.

Sleep came by way of a bright-blue futon against the wall. Perpendicular to the mattress was the same kind of portable clothes rack as in the main house. Seven red dresses hung neatly from padded black silk hangers. Orderly color progression: arterial blood to maroon. An equal number of tops in the same color progression was followed by a dozen pairs of blue, black, and gray skinny jeans and leggings.

Light from a dormer in the roof cast a fog-colored beam rife with dancing dust.

Across the room were shoe boxes stacked three-high, a pair of brown metal four-door cabinets, and a collection of orange cardboard box-files laid horizontally. Bottles of cosmetics and perfume sat on one of the cabinets.

First Lotz’s hole, now this.

Milo spent a while snapping photos with his phone, then handed me gloves and pointed to the shoes. “Do me a favor.”

I checked each box. Size eight and a half, a few hotshot designer labels, others I hadn’t heard of. Stilettos, pumps, sandals, spangled sneakers, all blood red.

I said, “Nothing but footwear.”

“Hmph.” He’d moved on to the orange files. Opened the first and said, “What?” Then: “That’s a first,” as all the boxes gave up their contents.

Precisely folded thong underwear, socks, and pantyhose. Red and black.

At the bottom of the last box were three pairs of body shapers like the one Kimbee DaCosta had worn the last day of her life.

“Why the hell would she need these?” he said.

I figured that as rhetorical and didn’t answer.

“No, I mean it, Alex. She had a dancer’s bod, what the hell was she covering up? Give me something psychological. I need to understand this girl.”

I said, “She made her living from her looks. Maybe she saw it as maintenance.”

He grumbled again. “She was sure maintaining at the wedding. To me that says she figured to meet someone who mattered.”

I thought: Or just force of habit.

I said, “The Brain?”

“Garrett Burdette’s pretty smart and he makes decent money. They break up a year ago but maybe library time means she was still trying to impress him.”

“She told Serena and Claire she’d ended the relationship. Why crash his wedding?”

“She was the one who got dumped and was saving face.”

“You’re figuring she was planning to humiliate him.”

“I’m figuring she pressured him with some sort of ultimatum and deadline before the wedding and he didn’t give her satisfaction. Best guess is the ‘or else’ involved either coming back to her or money.”

“Pay me to keep quiet about the affair.”

“Look at this place. Better than Lotz’s hole but that’s all you can say about it. She wasn’t exactly raking it in.”

He rearranged the orange boxes, walked over to the brown metal cabinets and tried a drawer.

No give. Same for all of them.

“Locked. Good. We’ll save the best for last.”

He inspected the makeshift bathroom.

Liquid soap and four types of expensive shampoo on the floor of the shower. The mirrored cabinet held analgesics, lotions, additional cosmetics and their applicators, shampoo, brushes, combs. A small bottle of Windex explained the spotless mirror.

On the floor were a hair dryer, a curling iron, and a box of rollers.

“Not a single damn narcotic,” he said. “Where are the weak-willed victims when you need them.”

I took a look at the interior of the medicine cabinet. “No birth control, either.”

“Autopsy said she wasn’t pregnant, never had been. Maybe after a few interesting years she decided to try celibacy.”

He eyed the locked cabinets. “Gimme your car keys.”

He returned with the crowbar I keep in my trunk. Took photos of the brown cabinets, muttering, “Chain of evidence,” then nosed the tip of the bar into the seam between the top drawer of the right-hand cabinet and the frame. One hard move and flimsy metal surrendered. Releasing the top drawer triggered some kind of latch and all six slid open. He looked inside.

“Undies in a box-file, now this?”

Emptying every drawer, he placed the contents on the floor.

Books.

Nothing but.

Hardcovers and large-format paperbacks, all with bland covers.

Upending every volume, he flipped pages and checked endpapers. “Introductory sociology? Western philosophy? Why the hell would she lock these up?”

“Maybe she’s saying, This is important to me.”

“A dedicated intellectual who models and strips.”

Why not?

I said, “It’s consistent with what the Valkyrie and the bouncers told us. In her spare time, she read. And once upon a time she did ballet, so maybe she had a taste for the classics.”

“You know anyone at Juilliard?”

“Robin probably does.”

“Por favor?”

Robin said, “Just Sharon Isbin, she’s head of the guitar department. If all you’re after is enrollment, why doesn’t Milo just call the ballet department?”

“Higher-education folk tend to distrust the police and if they tell him no, it could take weeks.”

“Okay, I’ll see if Sharon can point him in the right direction. Too late to try now, tomorrow morning.”

“Thanks, hon.”

Milo called out, “Thanks, darling!”

Robin said, “Someone’s in a good mood. Progress?”

I said, “Small steps.”

“Like most things that matter.” I clicked off.

Milo fished out another book and shook it. “Here’s a racy one, Civilization and Power... nothing personal in this whole damn place.”

As he made a second circuit of the garage, I had my own look at the volumes Kimbee DaCosta had sequestered.

Textbooks and nonfiction for the educated layperson. A sprinkle of yellow Used stickers brought back my starving student days. But no inscriptions, stamps from campus stores, or indication where any of the books had been sold or resold.

Still, the collection felt like college reading material and I said so. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and it was the U. and Maxine can snoop around.”

“How about getting telephonic with her again?”

Voicemail at “Professor Driver’s” office and personal cell. I asked her to call.

Milo said, “Here’s another possibility: Amanda knew Kimbee from school and fixed her up with Garrett. Because she thought Baby was a dolt and figured one brain deserved another.”

I said, “Do we know for a fact that The Brain was male?”

“The girls just referred to him as a boyfriend.”

“Maybe they were assuming. A girlfriend would explain no birth control.”

“You just turned up the spotlight on Amanda. Talk about a juicy motive, Alex. Being exposed as gay at her brother’s nuptials.”

He pushed the brown cabinets back in place. “Time to get this place dusted for prints and DNA.”

I said, “There goes the neighborhood.”

“What does that mean?”

“Like the girls said, this is quiet suburbia. The tech van will attract attention. You ready to go public on a street where neighbors are used to complaining?”

He tapped a foot. “Let’s see if the lab can give me one tech in a low-profile car.”

“Peggy Cho might welcome the opportunity.”

He phoned Cho, hung up smiling.

“Inspired, Alex. She’s finishing up a robbery in Granada Hills, is thrilled to go quote unquote ‘longitudinal,’ can be here in twenty. Meanwhile, let’s see if I can do something about the A-H up on Loma Bruna.”

A phone chat with a North Hollywood lieutenant named Atkins elicited a promise to crack down on the party house.

I said, “That was easy.”

“Uniforms have been going out there for months. Each time, there’s immediate compliance so they don’t push it.”

“Now there’s a change in policy?”

“Now there’s a change in Ben Atkins’s consciousness. He just remembered a favor I did him, don’t ask.”

“The power and the glory.”

“The first is useful, the second is bullshit.”

We returned to the main house. Serena and Claire were back on the floor drinking apricot-colored smoothies.

Milo told them about Peggy Cho’s impending arrival.

Serena said, “CSI? Can we watch?”

Milo said, “Only one tech’s coming and she likes to work alone. We’d actually like to avoid being noticed, period. So no one else in the neighborhood will know.”

“A girl CSI, cool,” said Serena. “So only us is in on it.”

“If that’s okay.”

“Sure — Cee?”

Claire said, “I can keep secrets. Been doing it my whole life.”

We waited outside for Cho. When she arrived, a drape on a front window lifted and Serena gave a thumbs-up.

When we got inside, Cho’s nose wrinkled. “My brother rented something like this. Chemical john, not too hygienic.”

She began to work and we returned outside where Milo slim-jimmed the Honda and used an internal lever to pop the trunk.

Flares, a spare tire, a jack, a wrench.

He said, “And here I was expecting the Oxford English Dictionary.”

Back to the car’s interior. The clothing on the backseat was more casual than the duds in the garage. One pair of jeans; one pair of slim-cut sweats — black, not red; a red sports bra, a red baseball cap with no insignia, white athletic socks banded with red at the top, red-and-white Nikes.

I pictured Kimbee DaCosta taking a run. Exhilirated by a balmy evening breeze.

The glove compartment gave up a pair of Ray-Ban aviators in a soft case, a registration slip listing the same address, and one shred of possibility: proof of insurance, a company named BeSure.com.

Milo closed the car, googled, found the company had gone out of business last year. We returned to the garage.

Peggy Cho said, “Not much by way of prints, so far, just what look like the same set in the logical places. I can tell because the thumb’s distinctive and I remember it from Saturday.”

“My victim.”

Nod. “But not much of her,” said Cho. “Like she was here but she really wasn’t.”

We returned to the Seville. I said, “Where to?”

He said, “The world of ideas.”