On Monday morning, Robert Cloud was again in Los Angeles, driving a rented car to the east side of town.
His open briefcase contained transcripts of Weldon Whitman’s preliminary hearing and Superior Court trial, at both of which Glory Ann Luza had testified. The first transcript gave an address on Carmelita Avenue in the Chicano district on the east side of town; the trial transcript gave Chico Avenue in El Monte. The family had moved after the hearing—very likely, Cloud mused, because of the attendant publicity; so they might well have moved again after the trial. Sighing, he pulled off the San Bernardino Freeway at El Monte.
The house on Chico was a duplex of cheap stucco, painted in mismatched shades of green. The landlady was a heavyset woman named Burney who had a stale odor about her.
“Sure, I know the Luzas,” she said. “I had them for tenants for seven months. Pretty good tenants too. Clean for Mexicans.”
“How long have they been gone?” Cloud asked.
“Oh, Christ, better than a year. They moved out right after that kid of theirs testified against that sex fiend that raped her. You remember that case?”
“Yes, I remember it.”
“Well, that little Luza girl was one of the victims that he committed all them perversions on.”
Cloud nodded. “You say they moved away right after the trial?”
“Yep. Very next day. Her picture was in the paper and all, you know. Whole neighborhood was talking about her. And you know how some of them Mexicans are. Proud as princes even when they ain’t got a pot or a window.”
“Do you have any idea where they moved to, Mrs. Burney?”
“Couldn’t even guess. The girl’s brother just backed a rental truck up to the door the day after the trial, and him and the old man loaded everything on it, and they was gone.”
“What was the brother’s name, do you remember?”
“They called him Ray, but I think it was short for something. Ramón, probably. Don’t ask me the parents’ names’cause I couldn’t begin to pronounce them.”
“Did the girl go to school while the family lived here?”
“I think so. I think she went to the high school over on Concert Street.”
In the El Monte Union High School office, Cloud was refused information by a series of clerks until finally, after much insistence, he ended up in the principal’s office. The principal was an attractive woman of fifty, whose manner was pleasant but firm.
“Mr. Cloud, it is absolutely against school policy to release personal information on any student except to law-enforcement agencies.”
“I thought perhaps you could make an exception since she’s a former student,” Cloud said.
“I’m sorry,” the principal said, “I’m afraid not.”
“Do you know about the trial the girl was involved in?”
“Of course. The whole school knew about it. It was the reason the family moved.”
“Let me ask you a question,” Cloud said. “How would you feel about helping me locate this girl if I told you there was a very strong possibility that she had identified the wrong man? And that an innocent man was on Death Row.”
“Why, I suppose I’d feel pretty much like anyone else would,” the principal replied. “I’d feel that it was an injustice that should be corrected. But I’m still bound by certain policies set down by the school authorities. If this man is innocent, as you say, I’m sure you should have no difficulty in getting proper authorization to obtain the information.”
“My problem is time,” Cloud explained. “This man is due to go to the gas chamber in a very short time.”
The principal thought about it a moment. “What makes you so certain that the man Glory Ann identified is innocent?”
“We’ve already proved that the other major witness against him was mistaken. That’s why it’s so urgent that we find the Luza girl. If we can show the same discrepancy in her identification, then we can get the death sentences reversed.”
“Mr. Cloud,” she said, “I would like to help you. Really. But you see, when the Luzas moved away, they gave the school no forwarding address. They didn’t even obtain a school transfer for Glory Ann; nor have we received a request for her records from any other school.”
Cloud pressed forward. “Would you be able to give me some information about Glory Ann’s family? Her father’s name, where he worked—anything at all to help me keep looking.”
The principal studied Cloud thoughtfully for a moment. Then she sighed quietly. “Wait here, please,” she said finally. She left the office and returned a moment later with a manila folder.
“Father: Emiliano,” she said. “Employed as a meat packer for Rancher Bob’s Sausage Company in Vernon. Mother: Josefa. Housewife.” She closed the folder and looked steadily at him. “I’ve just put my job on the line telling you that.”
Cloud shook his head. “No you haven’t.” He held out his hand. “It’s nice to meet someone like you.”
“I wish you luck,” she said, shaking his hand.
Rancher Bob’s Sausage Company was on a narrow industrial side street. Next to a scarred and rusted loading dock, Cloud found a door with a sign that read: GENERAL OFFICES—UPSTAIRS. He went up the narrow wooden stairway and entered a large, drab room of desks and file cabinets crowded together on an ancient tile floor. After a preliminary inquiry, Cloud found himself back down on the loading dock talking to the firm’s production foreman.
“Hell yes, I know’ Miliano Luza,” the man said. “One of the best meat packers I ever had.”
“Had?”
“Yeah. He left a year ago last August. With me eleven years.”
“Do you know where he went?” Cloud asked.
“Wait a minute. Before I do too much talking, what do you want him for, anyway?” The production foreman’s eyes had narrowed to a suspicious squint.
“It’s a legal matter,” Cloud said, “involving his daughter.”
“Legal matter, huh? Wouldn’t have anything to do with that son of a bitch that raped the girl, would it?”
“Well, first of all, the girl wasn’t raped—”
“She wasn’t, huh? That’s all you know, mister. Let me ask you one question: are you working for the guy that’s waitin’ to be gassed for what he did to that little girl?”
“I work for a foundation that represents him, yes.”
“Well, ain’t that nice!” He looked back over his shoulder. “Hey, Manuel, Dutch, Gerardo, all you guys come here!”
Half a dozen meat packers wearing heavy canvas aprons and thick canvas gloves left their packing tables and came up to the foreman.
“This here guy works for the son of a bitch that raped’Miliano’s little girl,” the foreman said belligerently.
“Look, I told you the girl wasn’t raped,” Cloud said. “The man who was convicted wasn’t even charged with rape—”
“Let me tell you something, mister,” the foreman said, his tone growing bolder with reinforcements behind him. “You better get the fuck out of here, you understand me? Don’t come sucking around here with your lousy questions trying to get us to help save that cocksucker from the gas chamber. We all liked’Miliano, see? He was one of us, you understand me? Now you get your ass out of here and you do it quick!”
He took a menacing step forward and Cloud held up a hand in submission.
“Okay, pal, take it easy—”
“I’m not your fucking pal either!”
“Whatever you say.” Cloud backed down the concrete steps to the street. When he got far enough back from his threatening adversary, he turned and started walking away.
“For your information,” the foreman yelled after him, “’Miliano didn’t tell nobody where he was going. We just want you to know we wouldn’t tell you nothin’ even if we did know!”
* * *
An hour later, Cloud was in downtown Los Angeles, in a bar on Hill Street, nursing his second martini. It was two o’clock; he had been in town barely five hours and already he had come to a complete dead end. The Luza family had disappeared. And it was obvious why. Everywhere Cloud had looked for them, he had found the stigma of what had happened to the girl. Everyone had instantly identified the family with the daughter’s tragedy. The shadow of their shame was long and dark.
Cloud leaned his forearm on the bar and sipped at his drink. The second martini, on a stomach that had long since digested breakfast, was beginning to make him feel warm. And he was tired. It had been a long day, even if it was still early afternoon.
He tried to think of other ways to trace the Luzas. The father, and probably the son Ramon, were more than likely employed somewhere in the vast, sprawling megalopolis of Los Angeles county. There was a good chance that the elder Luza still worked in the meat-packing business. Maybe there was a meat-packers’ union that had records he could check.
The son, Cloud reasoned, would have had to register for the draft too; but whether draft records were available for scrutiny or not was something Cloud did not know. The only records he knew were open to public examination were marriage licenses, business licenses, and voter registrations. Business licenses would probably be a long shot, but the other two might be definite possibilities. The father, mother, and brother might have registered to vote in their new precinct, and brother Ramón might have taken out a marriage license. For that matter, Glory Ann herself could have married; she was past twenty now.
He checked the Registrar of Voters first, in a building just north of the Civic Center. A large ground-floor room contained thick, heavy volumes stored row upon row above long, slanted reference ledges. The room, as Cloud had learned when he worked for the Ledger, was open to the public. When he got there, he went directly to the L section. Pulling the very last L volume down, he thumbed through to the back of it and began going down the list. Another dead end. Emiliano Luza had not registered to vote, nor had Josefa Luza, nor Glory Ann Luza. He did find three Ramón Luzas registered, but none of them was the right age.
Cloud drove next to the Hall of Records in the Civic Center. Because the business-license section was closest, he checked there first. Eighteen county business licenses had been issued to people named Luza—but none of them had the given names Cloud sought.
He went next to the marriage-license section. During the preceding two years, eight Luzas had been parties to marriage licenses issued in Los Angeles county. None of them had given names of Ramón or Glory Ann. Cloud even checked for the names Emiliano and Josefa, in case the parents might have divorced and remarried. Still nothing.
He was about to leave the marriage-license section when a thought suddenly came to the surface of his mind—a thought that had emerged from time to time ever since the day he and Lew Lach had interviewed Whitman in the county-jail visiting room.
“Married?”
“Not any more.”
“Where’s your ex?”
Whitman had shaken his head. “Forget it.”
Forget it. Cloud suspected Whitman wanted her kept under such deep cover because he was afraid that his former partner would threaten her in some way to keep Whitman from naming him. Perhaps had already threatened her; maybe that was why Whitman would not let Cloud look for him. Cloud fervently wished there was some way he could trace that former partner without Whitman knowing about it …
Maybe there was a way. If he could find Whitman’s ex-wife—talk to her quietly, without publicity, without revealing her whereabouts to anyone—perhaps he could learn the identity of the man Whitman himself so adamantly refused to name. It was an outside chance—but so was nearly everything else they had done. Cloud felt his enthusiasm returning. He went back to the marriage-license bureau’s master card index and found a card dated nearly six years earlier, indicating that a marriage license had been issued to Weldon Carpenter Whitman and Carol Ann Carter. Cloud felt a slight surge of excitement at the sight of the card; locating it was the first thing he had accomplished that day. He copied down the date and number of the li cense, and took the information up to the records counter.
“May I see the application for this license, please?”
The clerk looked at the date. “That’ll be on microfilm,” she said, handing Cloud a records-request form. “Fill this out, please, and then have a seat in the microfilm room right through that door.”
After five minutes, the counter clerk handed Cloud a reel of microfilm. “Take any available machine,” she said. “Instructions are on the card in each booth.”
Cloud sat down in one of the viewing booths, threaded the film through the viewer, turned on the light, and adjusted the image on the screen. He moved the film forward until he reached the number he had copied down. And there it was: an application for a marriage license, one half of it filled out in a neat, feminine hand, the other in Weldon Whitman’s now-familiar writing.
Cloud stared at the half of the form which had been filled out by Carol Ann Carter. He read it and re-read it, as if obligated to commit to memory its details: date of birth, place of birth, sex, race, religion, other now-inane facts. His eyes traced the neat, precise script of her handwriting: the penmanship was practiced, determined, exact. He knew without further thought that he was going to search for her.
Cloud left the Civic Center and drove east on the San Bernardino Freeway toward Alhambra, a suburb seven miles northeast of Los Angeles, where Carol Carter had lived when she and Whitman applied for their license. As he drove, he lighted another cigarette and immediately felt acid begin to churn in his stomach. He promised himself that he would at least stop for a hamburger as soon as he had found out what leads the Alhambra address would produce.
It was an old stucco house, long neglected. But to Robert Cloud, it might have been a palace, so buoyantly did it lift his spirits; for on a rusty, lidless mailbox, scribbled on a carelessly torn piece of paper held in place by an aged, yellowed strip of transparent tape, was the name Carter.
There was no sound from within when he pushed the doorbell, so Cloud knocked gently on the glass pane in the door. When there was no answer he knocked again, a little louder. After his second knock, a curtain on the inside of the door was pulled back and a scowling middle-aged female face peered suspiciously at him.
“Yeah, what do you want?”
“Is Carol Carter in?” Cloud asked. The woman’s mouth dropped open in as much surprise as if Cloud had cursed at her. Almost angrily she let go of the curtain and snatched open the door.
“Who are you?” she demanded with unconcealed suspicion.
“My name is Robert Cloud,” he told her. “I’m a writer. I’m looking for Carol Carter in connection with a story I’m doing.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed, showing dark lids and lower circles in a face that Cloud now saw was puffy and dough-colored. She clutched a soiled terrycloth robe together in front. “A story? On who?” she snorted. “That sex pervert she married?”
“Partly on Weldon Whitman, yes. Are you Carol’s mother?”
“I used to be,” the woman said loftily, “Before I disowned her.”
“Mrs. Carter, do you suppose I could come in and talk to you for a few minutes?”
“Not about Carol,” she said flatly. “I’m not going to talk about Carol. I already told you that I disowned her.”
“About Weldon Whitman then. Will you talk about him?”
“Sure. If I don’t have to say nothing good about him.”
She let Cloud in. The living room of the house looked as if it had come out of the mind of Tennessee Williams: ancient lace doilies, a green frieze sofa and matching club chair, a round table with a tall lamp built into it, a lampshade with tassels hanging from its rim.
Cloud sat in the club chair; he was at once engulfed by a musty, sour odor. “Mrs. Carter,” he began, “you sound like you really dislike Weldon Whitman. Would you mind telling me why?”
Lowering her heavy body into a half-sprawl on the couch facing him, she gathered the terrycloth robe between her knees. “He’s a sex pervert and he stole my daughter from me.”
“How did he steal her from you?”
“He made her run away. He encouraged her to leave her own mother, her own flesh and blood. That’s why I disowned her. That’s why I won’t talk about her.”
“Do you know where Carol is now, Mrs. Carter?”
She shook her head wearily. “No. I couldn’t find her if my life depended on it.”
“She doesn’t keep in touch with you at all?”
Again the weary shake of the head. “No. Why should she? I told you I’ve disowned her. She knows it too.”
“When was the last time you saw her?” Cloud asked.
“Three years ago,” the woman said. Cloud noticed her lip tremble slightly when she said it.
“Was she living with Weldon then?” he asked. He kept his voice controlled, but his mind was racing. Three years ago was a few months before the Spotlight Bandit crimes.
“She couldn’t have been living with him,” Mrs. Carter said. “He was in prison.”
Or just ready to get out, Cloud thought. “Do you have any idea where she might be working?”
“Probably in some hamburger joint somewheres,” the old woman said. “All she’s ever done is wait tables or carhop. She don’t know nothing else. Didn’t finish her last year of high school even. Last time I heard, she was working as a counter girl in the Donald’s Drive-in up in South Pasadena. A lady friend of mind was visiting her sister up there one afternoon and they stopped in for a bite to eat. Carol was the one who waited on them. She was probably working to support that pervert she was married to.”
“Why do you keep calling Whitman a pervert, Mrs. Carter? Is it because of what you’ve read about the Spotlight Bandit?”
The old woman snorted. “I don’t have to read no newspaper to be able to call him a pervert. I’ve heard about things he done to girls right here in Alhambra, things he never got caught for because them and their families was too ashamed to file charges.”
“What kind of things, Mrs. Carter?”
“Just things,” she said indignantly. “I don’t want to talk about them. They happened after him and Carol had split up, though, so it’s no reflection on her, you hear?”
“Sure.” Cloud nodded and rose to leave. “Do you know of any other place I can start looking for her besides Donald’s Drive-in?”
“No. I wouldn’t even know that if it hadn’t been for my lady friend. Carol, she quit telling me things years ago. That’s another reason why I disowned her.”
Cloud went to the door to let himself out. As he was about to go, the woman spoke to him again.
“Mister—?”
He paused and turned back.
“If you do find her will you tell her something for me?”
“Sure.”
“Tell her that her mother is all alone,” she said in as agonized a voice as Cloud had ever heard. “Tell her she ought to come see me some time and not leave me to just—just …” Her voice trailed off to nothing. Across the room, Cloud could see wetness starting in her eyes.
“I’ll tell her,” he said quietly.
At Donald’s Drive-in in South Pasadena, the first thing Cloud did was to wolf down two big Donaldburgers and a chocolate shake, eating so fast that for a moment he felt slightly nauseated. It was now nearly five o’clock. When Cloud finished eating, he smoked a cigarette and then asked to see the manager. A cheerful little man with a cherubic face came over to the booth.
“I’m the manager,” he said. “Barry Woodbury. What can I do for you?”
“I’m looking for a girl that worked here about three years ago,” Cloud said. “Were you here then?”
“Sure was.” The manager slid into the seat facing him.
“The girl I’m trying to locate is Carol Carter. Do you remember her?”
“Sure do. Great little gal. Real hustler when the counter got busy.”
“She’s not still with you by any chance, is she?”
“She may still be with the chain,” Woodbury said. “She transferred to another branch so she could be close to school.”
“What school was that?”
“I’m not real sure. It was one of those adult-education programs where you go nights to get a high-school diploma.”
Cloud nodded. “Is there a main office you can call to find out if she’s still working for the chain?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” the manager said, a little hesitantly now. “What are you trying to find her for, anyway?”
“It’s kind of personal,” Cloud said, “but I’ll tell you since you’re going to all this trouble to help me. Carol used to be married, before she came to work here. The man she was married to may be dying. I want to get in touch with her about it.”
“That’s too bad,” Woodbury said. “He must be a pretty young guy, too.”
“Too young to die,” Cloud replied.
“Yeah.” Woodbury stood up, looking slightly uncomfortable, “I’ll go make that call.”
While he waited, Cloud looked out the window at the night’s slow traffic. It was dark now and cars were backed up at all four traffic signals. Cloud still had no place to stay for the night. He had picked up the rental car at the airport and started right out looking for Glory Ann Luza. His suitcase was still in the trunk. Wondering idly where he was going to sleep that night made him think, for some reason, of Laurel. Actually, Whitman’s mother-in-law reminded him of Laurel, he realized. He thought of the home Whitman’s wife had come from, the same kind of home Laurel had worked so hard to get away from. Now Laurel had a good job and apartment … He wondered if she still lived at the same place. Then he thought that it really made no difference whether she did or not, because it was Monday, and on Mondays and Thursdays she did counseling in the evening. For extra money. He grunted softly.
Barry Woodbury returned to interrupt his thoughts. “I found out a couple of things for you,” he said. “First off, Carol’s not with the company anymore. When she left here, she transferred to our downtown L.A. location, on Olive near Eighth—”
Cloud sighed softly. That was a block from the bar he had been sitting in at two o’clock that afternoon.
“Like I said, she was going to night school somewhere down in that area to get her high-school diploma. When she finally got it, about six months later, she quit hustling hamburgers to get a better job.”
“Did they know where?” Cloud asked.
“Not for sure,” Woodbury said. “She didn’t tell anybody where she was going, but her personnel record shows that about a week later there was an inquiry from General Telephone out in Santa Monica. She was applying for a job in the accounting department there. And I guess she must’ve got it, because that was the only place that ever called for a reference.”
“Sounds like a good lead,” Cloud said. “I appreciate the help.”
Woodbury smiled a good-natured smile as Cloud got up to leave. “Well, if you find her, tell her Barry Woodbury said hello.”
“I’ll do that,” Cloud said.
Cloud went outside and took several breaths of the cooling South Pasadena air. He lighted another cigarette, curled his lips in distaste at the staleness of it, but chose not to throw it away. He got into the car and waited patiently to pull into the freeway-bound traffic. There was no sense in rushing; it was a good twenty miles to Santa Monica, and there was nothing he could do there except find a motel for the night and check out his lead in the morning.
The General Telephone Company, he thought as he drove along in the crawling traffic. The accounting department yet. That made Carol Carter’s mother wrong about one thing: there apparently was something Carol could do besides wait tables or carhop.