Guilt

“Gorgeous,” said the man. “True work of art. I saw it in … ’50, so we’re talking a twelve-year-old car. But you’d never know. Shiny, kept up beautifully. Those chrome supercharger pipes coming out the side were like pythons on the prowl. All that menace and power, I’m telling you, that was one magnificent beast.”

“Who owned it?” said Milo.

The man shook his head. “I tried to get her to tell me, she’d just smile and change the subject.”

“She?”

“Eleanor,” said the man. “Ellie Green. She lived there-that brick place pretending to be this place, that’s where the Duesie used to park. Right in the driveway. Not often, just once in a while. And always at night but there was a porch light so you could see it. Down to the color. Looking back, it had to be a boyfriend of hers, but I was a kid, five years old, it was the car that interested me, not her personal life. I’d never seen anything like it, asked my father about it. He knew everything about everything when it came to cars, raced at Muroc before the war.”

He grinned. “Then he married my mother and she civilized him and he went to work selling Packards downtown. He’s the one who filled me in on the Duesie. That’s how I know it was a true SJ. Because he told me it wasn’t one of those where someone retrofitted the pipes, this was the real deal.”

“He never mentioned whose it was?”

“Never asked him,” said the man. “Why, what’s up? I saw all the commotion yesterday. What happened at that place?”

“Something was found there. What can you tell us about Ellie Green, sir?”

“She babysat me. Back before I started school, I was always sick. My parents got tired of never going out, so they hired her to watch over me. Couldn’t have been fun for her, I was a runty piece of misery, had scarlet fever, bad case of the mumps, measles even worse, could throw up at will and believe me, I did when the devil told me to.” He laughed. “At one point they thought I had diphtheria but it was just some nasty flu. But Ellie was always patient.”

“How old was she?”

“Hmm … to a kid everyone looks old. Probably thirty, give or take? Why’re you asking about her? What was found over there? I asked one of your guys in uniform but all he said was an incident.”

Milo said, “Some bones were dug up in the backyard. It was on the news, Mr.-”

“Dave Helmholtz. I avoid the news. Back when I was a stockbroker I had to pay attention, now I don’t. Bones as in human?”

“Yes, sir. A complete human skeleton. A baby.”

“A baby? Buried in the backyard?”

Milo nodded.

Helmholtz whistled. “That’s pretty grotesque. You think Ellie had something to do with it? Why?”

“We don’t know much at all at this point, Mr. Helmholtz, but there’s indication the bones were buried during the early fifties. And the only information we picked up about that period was that a Duesenberg was sometimes parked at the house.”

“Early fifties,” said Helmholtz. “Yup, that could certainly fit when Ellie was here. But why in the world would she bury a baby? She didn’t have any kids.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive. And I never saw her pregnant. Just the opposite, she was skinny. For back then, I mean. Today she’d be what’s expected of a woman.”

“How long did she live there?”

“She babysat me for close to a year.”

“Did she have a day job?”

“Sure,” said Helmholtz. “She was a nurse.” He smoked, tamped, smoked some more. “Mom made a big deal about that-‘a trained nurse.’ Because I pulled a snit about being left with a stranger. I was a cranky runt, mama’s boy, afraid of my own shadow. Trained nurse? What did I care? The first time Ellie came over, I hid under the covers, ignored her completely. She sat down, waited me out. Finally I stuck my head out and she was smiling at me. Bee-yootiful smile, I’m talking movie-star caliber, the blond hair, the red lips, the smoky eyes. Not that I care much about that, I kept ignoring her. Finally I got hot and thirsty and came out and she fetched me something to drink. I had a fever, that year I always had a fever. She put a cold compress on my forehead. She hummed. It soothed me, she had a nice voice. She was a nice person. Never tried to force anything, real relaxed. And a looker, no question about that.”

I smiled. “You didn’t care about her looks, you were concentrating on the Duesenberg.”

Helmholtz stared at me. Broke into laughter. “Okay, you got me, I had a crush on her. Who wouldn’t? She was nice as they came, took care of me, I stopped being upset when my parents went out.”

“Obviously, someone else thought she was nice.”

“Who’s that?”

“The owner of the Duesenberg.”

“Oh,” said Helmholtz. “Yeah, Mr. Lucky Bastard.” He laughed some more. “That’s what Dad called him. Looking back it makes sense. Some rich guy wooed her, maybe that’s why she left.”

I said, “She never gave you any indication at all who he was?”

“I asked a couple of times, hoping maybe she’d figure out I loved the car, was angling for a ride. All she did was smile and change the subject. Now that I think about it, she never talked about herself, period. It was always about me, what I wanted, what I needed, how was I feeling. Pretty good approach when you’re working with a spoiled little brat, no? I can see her doing great as a nurse.”

He brightened. “Hey, maybe Lucky Bastard was a rich doctor. Isn’t that why girls became nurses back then? To hook up with M.D.s?”

Milo said, “Is there anything else you can tell us about her?”

“Nope. I turned six, got miraculously better, went to school, made friends. Don’t know exactly when Ellie moved out but it wasn’t long after and instead of the Duesenberg we got a Plymouth. Big family with a Plymouth station wagon the color of pea soup. Talk about a comedown.”

I said, “Could you estimate how many times you saw the Duesenberg?”

“You’re trying to figure out if she was entertaining some regular visitor, something hot and heavy going on? Well, all I can say is less than a dozen and probably more than half a dozen.”

“At night.”

“So how did a five-year-old see it? Because that five-year-old was a disobedient brat who’d sneak out of the house through the kitchen in the middle of the night and walk over to see the car. Sometimes it was there, sometimes it wasn’t. The last time I tried it, I ran into my father. He was standing on the sidewalk in front of Ellie’s house, looking at the car, himself. I turned to escape, he saw me, caught me. I thought he’d whack me but he didn’t. He laughed. Said, yeah, it’s fantastic, Davey, can’t blame you. That’s when he told me the model. ’Thirty- eight SJ. And what the pipes meant, the advantage of supercharging. We stood there together, taking in that monster. It was one of those-I guess you’d call it a bonding thing. But then he warned me never to leave the house without permission or he would tan my hide.”

Helmholtz smiled. “I always felt he thought I was a sissy. I guess he didn’t punish me because he assumed I was out there being a guy.”

We continued up the block. No one else remembered Ellie Green or the Duesenberg.

Back at the station, Milo ran her name. Nearly two dozen women came up but none whose stats fit the slim blonde who’d lived at the bone house in 1951. He repeated the process with Greene, Gruen, Gruhn, even Breen, came up empty. Same for death notices in L.A. and the neighboring counties.

I said, “She worked as a nurse and the box came from the Swedish Hospital.”

He looked up the defunct institution, pairing it with Eleanor Green and the same variants. A few historical references popped up but the only names were major benefactors and senior doctors.

He said, “Helmholtz could be right about Lucky Bastard being a medical honcho. Maybe even someone George Del Rios or his two M.D. kids knew and Ellie Green came to rent the house through personal referral.”