father was ill-and for the first time in a long time, I felt something other than anger toward Arthur Spanning.
The clerk reminded me that it was closing time and so I hurriedly turned my attention to the top of the form, “Decedent Personal Data.”
Arthur’s father was listed as Unknown Spanning; his state of birth, unknown; his mother’s maiden name, unknown. Past experience with death certificates had taught me that this did not mean he was illegitimate-only that the doctor filling out the certificate didn’t have the information.
Arthur had not served in the military, and his years of education completed were listed as six-a surprise to me, since I remembered him as a man who could converse easily on all sorts of subjects. I wondered if this was a typographical error. Then again, he had married into lots of money when he was very young, so perhaps he was self-educated.
I wrote down the Las Piernas address listed in the “Usual Residence” section and tried to picture its general location. Downtown; perhaps one of the new lofts or condos. Not really as snooty an address as I would have guessed, especially supposing he had inherited the big bucks after Gwendolyn DeMont’s death. Maybe it was a case of easy come, easy go. Arthur might have blown that fortune in the first few years after her murder.
There was one other surprise on the form. In space number fourteen, “Marital Status,” the word “Married” was typed in; and in space number fifteen, “Name of Surviving Spouse; If Wife, Enter Maiden Name,” was “Briana Maguire.”
“You liar!” I said aloud, causing the clerk to look up at me. I calmed down. Why should I be surprised that Arthur was still occasionally faking people out about his marriage to my aunt? Grudgingly, I also had to admit the possibility that if Travis spent much time around him, he might have been trying to hide his son’s illegitimacy. But why not say they were divorced?
The clerk finally lost all patience and all but snatched the form back from me. When I asked if I could make a copy, she said, “You should have thought of that option four and a half minutes ago. Come back tomorrow.”
A friendly, helpful clerk in county records is an asset in my line of work, and not someone you want to piss off, so I apologized profusely, and told her I owed her big time.
She laughed and said, “Honey, I hear that every day from one person or another, and I ain’t seen no ‘big time’ yet.”
Rachel called on Thursday night to say she hadn’t been able to find anything on Travis, but had some luck locating the DeMonts. I told her I had Friday off, and we decided to meet in the morning.
“You hear anything more from Jimmy Mac?” she asked.
I told her I hadn’t been contacted again by McCain and was beginning to believe he wasn’t much interested in me as a suspect, but she warned me against this kind of thinking. I tried to get her to talk about how she had come to know so much about him.
“See you tomorrow morning,” she said, once again shying away from any discussion about her past connection to him.
But our Friday plans were changed about ten minutes later, when Sophia Longworth called from the Mission Viejo Library.
“I think I know where you can meet up with your cousin,” she said.
“Great!” I said, not realizing that all hell was about to break loose.
11
Sophia Longworth asked if I had heard back from my cousin by e-mail.
“Nothing yet,” I said.
“He travels a lot,” she said, “and he may not be checking his e-mail from the road. That’s why I posted a note on PUBYAC.”
“PUBYAC?”
“It’s an Internet list for librarians who specialize in services for children and young adults. I received several responses, but most of them were places where he had been, not where he was scheduled to appear in the future. Only one of the librarians responded with a future date. It’s not much notice, I know, but if you can get up to North Hollywood tomorrow morning, you might catch him at the Valley Plaza Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. He’s doing two performances there, one in Spanish, one in English.”
“What time?” I asked.
“The Spanish performance is at nine, the English at ten.”
When I called Rachel back to tell her that my plans had changed again, she offered to come with me. “That way, you can use the carpool lanes,” she said.
“Don’t give me that,” I said. “You’ll never convince me that you’re just volunteering to be my diamond-lane dummy.”
“You can be the dummy. We’ll take my car.”
“The Karmann Ghia will get us there.”
“Yeah, well, my car will get us there and back. I don’t mind driving. Besides, I want to talk to you about what I’ve learned so far.”
So the next morning we were on our way to North Hollywood. North Hollywood, like Hollywood itself, isn’t a city. West Hollywood is, but Hollywood and North Hollywood are part of the City of Los Angeles. Los Angeles is full of irregularly drawn boundaries; some of them can be seen on maps.
North Hollywood is near the eastern edge of the San Fernando Valley, about forty miles from Las Piernas. There was no way to get to it during business hours without going through some patch of traffic hell.
Not all of the old freeways between Las Piernas and North Hollywood had been retrofitted with carpool lanes, though, so although we were both curious about Travis’s storytelling, neither of us had wanted to leave at five in the morning and then hang out in the Valley for three hours, which is what we would have to do to be at the library at nine. We had decided we’d aim for the ten o’clock English performance and try to miss some of the morning rush hour-an “hour” that begins around six and often lasts as late as ten.
As we made our way up the San Gabriel River Freeway to Interstate 5, my nervousness over the upcoming encounter with Travis increased. Rachel was humming “Jimmy Mac” to herself again, but I was too preoccupied with more immediate worries to pursue that line of conversation. I feigned an interest in the passengers of other cars, all the while trying to rehearse what I would say to Travis. It occurred to me that he might not even know he had cousins.
It suddenly seemed hot and stuffy in the car, and though I knew the sensation had nothing to do with the climate inside the car, I rolled the window down a little. I was immediately greeted by a puff of diesel exhaust and the rattling, banging metal clamor of a semi in the next lane. I rolled the window back up. Rachel looked over at me, then turned the air conditioner on.
“That won’t help,” I said.
She shrugged and turned it off.
After a minute or two had gone by, she said, “I’ve managed to track down most of the people who were mentioned in those articles.”
“The articles about the murder of Gwendolyn DeMont?”
“Right.” She cast another quick look in my direction, then said, “You know, even if he has no interest in getting to know you and your sister, maybe Travis will want to contact someone in his father’s family.”
“Maybe,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant about that possibility. I pulled the sun visor down, adjusted it up and down as I looked in the little mirror on it-as if I were checking my makeup. It might have been more convincing if I had been wearing any. In the car behind us, I noticed a man in a baseball cap driving a dark green Oldsmo-bile sedan, a car that been behind us once or twice before. I couldn’t make out his face, but there was something vaguely familiar about him.
“Well, if he does want to contact them, I’ve got an address for Gerald Spanning,” Rachel said, getting my full attention.
“Arthur’s brother? I talked to him.”
“The one in Los Alamitos?”
