The body shop next door was still standing, but my building had been torn down and replaced with a used-car lot.
At Washington Boulevard, I headed west to Sepulveda, then continued south until a block past Culver. I turned left at a tropical fish store with a coral-reef mural painted on the windows and drove down the block, searching for the address Milo had pulled out of the DMV files.
Lindblade was packed with small, boxy, one-story bungalows with composition roofs and lawns just big enough for hopscotch.
Liberal use of texture-coat; the color of the month was butter. Big
Chinese elms shaded the street. Most of the houses were neatly maintained, though the landscaping-old birds of paradise, arborvitaes, spindly tree roses-seemed haphazard.
Dawn Herbert's residence was a pale-blue box one lot from the corner.
An old brown VW bus was parked in the driveway. Travel decals crowded the lower edge of the rear window. The brown paint was dull as cocoa powder.
A man and a woman were gardening out in front, accompanied by a large golden retriever and a small black mutt with spaniel pretensions.
The people were in their late thirties or early forties. Both had pasty, desk-job complexions lobstered with patches of fresh sunburn on upper arm and shoulder, light-brown hair that hung past their shoulders, and rimless glasses. They wore tank tops, shorts, and rubber sandals.
The man stood at a hydrangea bush, clippers in hand. Shorn flowers clumped around his feet like pink fleece. He was thin and sinewy, with mutton-chop sideburns that trailed down his jaw, and his shorts were held up by leather suspenders. A beaded band circled his head.
The woman wore no bra and as she knelt, bending to weed, her breasts hung nearly to the lawn, brown nipples visible. She looked to be the man's height five nine or ten but probably outweighed him by thirty pounds, most of it in the chest and thighs. A possible match for the physical dimensions on Dawn Herbert's driver's license but at least a decade too old for the 63 birthdate.
As I pulled up I realized that the two of them looked vaguely familiar.
But I couldn't figure out why.
I parked and turned off the engine. Neither of them looked up.
The little dog started to bark, the man said, 'Down, Homer,' and continued clipping.
That was a cue for the bark to go nuclear. As the mutt scrunched his eyes and tested the limits of his vocal cords, the retriever looked on, bemused. The woman stopped weeding and searched for the source of irritation.
She found it and stared. I got out of the car. The mutt stood his ground but went into the face-down submissive posture.
I said, 'Hey, boy,' bent and petted him. The man lowered his clippers.
All four of them were staring at me now.
'Morning,' I said.
The woman stood. Too tall for Dawn Herbert, too. Her thick, flushed face would have looked right at a barn raising.
'What can I do for you?' she said. Her voice was melodious and I was certain I'd heard it before. But where?
'I'm looking for Dawn Herbert.'
The look that passed between them made me feel like a cop.
'That so?' said the man. 'She doesn't live here anymore.'
'Do you know where she does live?'
