LA Requiem

Joe went over and took the glass. 'This is Detective Dolan, the one I told you about. She needs to ask questions.'

'Hello, Mr. Garcia. I'm sorry for your loss.' Dolan held up her gold detective's shield.

Frank squinted at the badge, then considered Dolan almost as if he was afraid to ask the thing he most wanted to know. 'Who killed my daughter?'

'That's why I'm here, sir. We're trying to find out.'

'You people been on this for a week. Don't you have any idea who did this? '

It couldn't have been more pointed than that.

Dolan smiled gently, telling him that she understood his pain, and perhaps even shared it. 'I need to ask you about some people that you or Karen might've known.'

Frank Garcia shook his head, but when he spoke we could barely hear him. 'Who?'

'Did Karen know somebody named Julio Munoz?'

'Is that the bastard who killed her? '

'No, sir. We're contacting everyone in Karen's Rolodex, but four names have outdated numbers. We want to ask about their last contact with Karen, what she might've said, things like that.' Dolan was good. She told her lie smoothly and without hesitation as if it were an absolute fact.

Frank seemed annoyed that this small reason was all there was to it. 'I don't know any Julio Munoz.'

'How about Walter Semple or Vivian Trainor or Davis Keech? Karen might've known them in school, or maybe they worked for you.'

'No.' You could see he was trying to remember, and was disappointed that he couldn't.

'Karen never mentioned them to you?'

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'No.'

Dolan said, 'Mr. Garcia, when I moved out of my parents' house, I left boxes of things behind. Old school things. Old pictures. If Karen left anything like that here, could I look at them?'

He wheeled just far enough around to see his housekeeper. 'Maria, take her back to Karen's mom, par favor.'

I was following Dolan when Frank said, 'I want to see you guys for a minute.'

He waited until Dolan disappeared through the big doorway, then lowered his voice. 'She knows more than she's telling, and I'll bet my last tortilla those people she asked about aren't what she said. Keep an eye on her back there. See if you can't get her to let on what she's really after.'

I guess a man doesn't go from being a stonemason to a multimillionaire by being an idiot.

Joe stayed with Frank, but I followed the hall until I came to Maria, waiting for me outside a door.

'Gracias, Maria. We'll be fine.'

I stepped into what had been Karen's room, and in a way still was. A teenager's furniture froze the room in time. Books and stuffed animals and posters of bands that hadn't existed for a dozen years made the door a time portal taking me into the past. A Flock of Seagulls. Jesus.

Dolan was thorough. Except for old clothes and the knick-knacks young women collect, there wasn't much left in the room, but we spent almost three hours going through high school and college notebooks, high school yearbooks, and the bits of a life that accumulate in the shadows of a child's room. Other than clothes, the closet was a floor- to-ceiling wall of board games. Parcheesi, Monopoly, Clue, Life. We opened every box.

Maria brought Mexican iced tea at one point, sweet with lime and mint. We found more boxes under the bed. Most of them held clothes, but one was filled with notes and letters from a pen pal named Vicki Quesada that Karen had had during her first two years at UCLA. We skimmed every letter, looking for the four names, but found none of them. I felt a

150 ROBERT CRAIS

kind of distance, reading the letters, until one of them mentioned Joe. The date put it about the time Karen was a sophomore. Vicki had written that Joe sounded really hot, and she wanted Karen to send a picture. I smiled. 'That Joe.'

'What's that?'

'Nothing.'

Dolan frowned and touched her waist. 'Oh, shit.'

'What?'

'I'm being paged. Goddamnit, it's Krantz. I'll be right back.'

Dolan took her purse and left the room.

I finished going through the letters, and found six more references to Joe, the next being that Joe was 'soooo cute' (she'd gotten the picture). The letters were organized by date, so were easy to follow, but most of the references were questions: What's it like dating a policeman? Aren 't your friends nervous around him? Does he take you for rides in the car? The first two or three references made me smile, but the last references didn't. Vicki wrote that she was sorry things weren't working out with Joe, but that men were bastards and always wanted what they couldn't have. In the last letter that mentioned him, she wrote, 'Why do you think he loves someone else?'

I felt awkward and ashamed, as if I had peeped through a keyhole into a part of Joe's life that he had not shared with me. I put the letters back in the box, and the boxes under the bed.

Dolan came back, looking irritated. 'You find anything?'

'No.'

'I've got some good news for the old man. We're releasing the girl's body. He can have her buried, at least.'

'Yeah. He'll appreciate that.' I was still thinking about Joe.

'Here's the bad news: Krantz isn't going to stake the funeral.'

That stopped me. 'Come on, Dolan. Staking the funeral is a no-brainer.' Killers will sometimes attend their victims' burials. Sometimes they'll even give themselves away.

'I know that, Cole, but it isn't up to me. Krantz is scared of putting in for so much overtime when he's got a twenty-

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four/seven on Dersh. He says how can he justify the other when we already know who did it.'

'He doesn't have squat on Dersh. Barney Fife would stake that funeral.'

Her mouth hardened until white dots appeared at either corner. 'We'll deal with it, World's Greatest, okay? I'm going to attend. I can probably scare up a couple of the other guys to come in off the clock. I hate to ask this, considering, but you think you could help out?'

I told her that I would.

'What about Deege? Did anyone ever follow up on him, or is that too much overtime?'

'You're a real shit, you know that? '

'I know it's not you, Dolan. I'm sorry.'

She shook her head then, and raised her hands. Suddenly tired with it all.

'I told you the uniforms are keeping an eye out. He hasn't turned up yet, is all. Okay?'

'I know it's not you.'

'Yeah. Right.'

She frowned at the room like maybe we'd forgotten the one place to look that would give us what we need. Finally, she said, 'I guess we're done here, Cole. Hell, it's after six. You want to grab a drink or something?'

'I'm having dinner with my girlfriend.'