Vertical Coffin

Chapter 35

The twin palms Restaurant was developed by Cindy Costner in the mid-nineties. It's located on Green Street, just one block south of Colorado Boulevard in Old Town Pasadena. Old Town is one of the great redevelopment stories in Southern California. Back in the eighties it was a slum. Situated at the west end of Colorado Boulevard, it had become a hang out for winos, hookers, and hugger-muggers. Drug dealers hung on every corner selling bags of cut. Low-end secondhand stores were lumped in with all the urban decay, and the entire nine-or ten-block area had completely slid off the human spectrum into some sort of environmental hell.

Then a group of entrepreneurs saw an opportunity. They bought the land cheap and tore down the slums, while saving the period architecture. They lured in retail chains and designer shops and sprinkled in some upscale sidewalk restaurants with colorful Cinzano umbrellas shading decorative wrought iron tables. Presto! Four years later, Old Town became a shopper's mecca. Caffe Mocha and sushi bars, Tommy Bahama and The Gap. The winos moved east and started camping out under the freeway.

I pulled to the curb in front of the white-tented patio restaurant, then handed my keys to a red-coated valet and walked around the corner to the gated entrance. I didn't have a reservation, but it was a large place and there were enough tables so that you could be seated without too long a wait. I spotted Jo over at the bar. In one fist she had a Coors Light, the other was up to her mouth, head tilted back, tossing salted peanuts down her throat. Nothing too delicate there.

"You beat me," I said.

"Story of our short little partnership," she said, then slid off the stool and followed the hostess to a table over by the wall, taking the preferred gunfighter's seat looking out at the room, leaving me with the chair facing a slab of concrete. I settled in and ordered a Corona with a lime squeeze.

As I watched our hostess walk away to give my order to the bartender, Jo said, "So the neighbor says there were two kids. A boy and a girl."

"That's right. Susan and a boy, probably Vincent, both around the same age."

"Twins?" she said, looking up at me with a hunter's predatory gaze.

"I don't know. He didn't say."

"Twins would have the same DNA, right?" She was leaning forward now, a pointer on scent. "What if that was Smiley's twin sister they found in the bathtub up at Hidden Ranch Road? What if he did go out through the tunnel like you thought?" Loving her connect-the-dots theory, looking intently at me, waiting for me to pump my fist and go "Yesss!"

Instead, I felt myself frowning. "To begin with, we don't know if they were twins or not. Second, a girl and a boy would be fraternal twins, not identical."

"So what?" she said brushing that aside with an impatient gesture.

"We have an identical DNA match at the morgue. A boy and a girl can't have identical DNA. Fraternal twins don't look the same or have to be the same sex, because they come from two separate female eggs fertilized by two separate male sperms."

"You're sure about that?"

"No, I'm just saying it to mess up your theory."

"Look, you don't have to be copping attitude all the time. It was just a question."

"I was dealt off to a foster family in Torrance when I was seven. They had fraternal twins. Tom and Morgan Weiss. I had it explained half a dozen times. To have identical DNA, they have to be identical twins. That's the way it is."

"But all of a sudden we've got an extra kid here. Maybe his sis can fill in some of the blanks." She was jazzed. "So how do we find Susan?" she asked.

"We go back through county records. Start hunting. Of course, Susan might be married now. Different name."

She thought for a minute, then finally said, "How do you want to do this?"

"Huntington Hospital is only a mile or two from here, down Arroyo. If they lived here, maybe that was where they were born, and you can access Edna Smiley's prenatal records for the mid-to late seventies, find out for sure if they were twins, or if they were just brother and sister. Susan could have been a few years younger or older than Vincent. Mr. Phillips wasn't too sure of anything. Maybe there's other family listed on that form that we can contact."

"What're you going to do?" she asked.

"I'm gonna go see Midge Kimble. Maybe Susan went to that school with her brother and she can remember something."

Just then my cell phone rang. I looked at the readout: Jeb Calloway.

"Who is it?" she asked.

"My skipper." I turned the phone off and put it back on my belt.

"Aren't you gonna take it?"

"It's just him telling me to contact the IOs at Justice. The minute I do that we're gonna both get turned into info humpers for the FBI. Turn yours off, too. Let's be out of cell range for a while." She reached into her purse and switched off her cell.

The waiter came over and handed us menus. "Something for lunch?" he asked.

"Sorry, we're going to have to leave. Something just came up," I told him.

While we were waiting outside for our cars Jo touched my arm, and I turned to face her.

"I hate to tell you this, Hoss, but you were right. If we hadn't been reworking Smiley's background we would have completely missed this. Feels important, like it might lead somewhere."

"But let's not get carried away. So far, all we have are questions and we only have a few hours to get the answers before we're yanked in a another direction."

"Maybe you should learn to take a fucking compliment yourself," she grinned. Then she did a strange thing-she reached out and took my hand. "Don't get the wrong idea here, Scully, this is purely professional, but as partners go, you ain't half bad."

Our cars arrived. She had managed to get the green Suburban back from Vice. She got in and, without looking back, roared off toward Huntington Hospital. A few minutes later I was in the Acura on my way to see what Midge Kimble had to offer.

My nose was definitely twitching. Or, as Jigsaw John might have said, "We got our first whiff of something good here, boy."