A flooded water main near Griffith Park ruined what had up until then been a successful shortcut into the Valley. The storm drains couldn’t handle the volume of water coming down off Los Feliz and traffic backed up all the way along Riverside Drive. By the time I made it to Lois Hearns’s home in Burbank it was well past dark.
Her street’s best feature was that it was an effective shortcut between two of the big studios. Otherwise it was an unkempt stretch lined with ficus trees decades past the point of needing pruning. The house was a substandard ranch that hadn’t been updated since the 1950s. A few of the shutters leaned against the garage as if begging for someone to return them to their rightful home. It looked like they had been waiting for a while.
I walked up the short driveway and approached the attached garage. The door was partly ajar, and I could see the glare of a fluorescent light inside as well as a pair of work boots moving around. I called out to announce my presence but didn’t get a response. I knocked on the cheap aluminum door, which rattled more loudly than I needed it to.
“Yeah?” barked a voice.
I didn’t get very far into my planned introduction.
“I’m busy,” came the response.
“I’ll try not to take up too much of your time,” I said, and then added a little tidbit to whet his appetite. “It’s about the money.”
“It’s always about the money,” I heard him say, and then watched a hand curl under the door and shove it high up on its rails. I stepped inside but he didn’t lower the door behind me. Maybe he anticipated my visit would be short.
The walls were lined with well-marked work-shelves and covered in pegboard holding more types of wrenches than I thought existed. A few red tool chests on caster wheels served as hubs of the work activity. At the center sat an old engine from some hot rod long past its racing days perched on a block like a lion statue. A portable infrared heater chased out some of the cold, damp air, and although I was loath to get any grease on my work slacks, this place just begged for me to pull up a stool, crack a beer, and talk about engine parts that I knew nothing about.
“I’m always interested in money,” he said with a smile, “as long as it isn’t the kind leaving my wallet.”
“We’re of like minds,” I told him.
He shot me a look.
“Maybe.”
Mr. Hearns was in his sixties. He wore tired jeans and a paper-thin white T-shirt from which a pair of long arms hung like ropes. Two golf balls under the skin served as elbows. His yellow-gray hair was pulled back into a ponytail, but I wasn’t about to resent him for it. Where my co-worker Paul wore his as a symbol of some insincere allegiance to the counterculture, Hearns’s fit with his legitimate toughness. He looked like someone with deceptive strength, the kind that you discovered too late.
“First, let me offer my condolences,” I started. “A tragic development, to say the least.”
“Yes, it was,” he replied. “We had the service today.”
“I wasn’t aware,” I said. “Apologies for intruding.”
Hearns was a difficult man to read. I couldn’t tell if he was upset or indifferent or something else. After a moment, it was clear he wasn’t ready to shoo me away just yet.
“So did Lo have some kind of insurance policy or something?”
“Not that I know of,” I said, and then wondered why he immediately shot to this potential money source presented to him by a perfect stranger. He gave me his reason, which came in the form of an insult.
“You look like an insurance man,” he said, shrugging.
I had hoped to present myself as some sort of detective of the official or private kind. Having been dismissed as a hawker of extended warranties, I now had to defend the significance of an imaginary role.
“Trust me, I am not in insurance,” I scoffed. “I help people recover money, like the large payments made to your wife over the last year.”
“Cops said something about that,” he said.
“Did you know about it?” I asked.
“Not until they told me. Bastards thought I had it.” After giving it some proper reflection, he added, “Man, I hate cops.”
“Everyone does.”
Our mutual distaste for law enforcement put me right in his book.
“So large sums, huh?”
He was trying to coax out what different interpretations he and I might have of the word large.
“Couple hundred thousand,” I told him.
He whistled between the gap in his front teeth. His gaze fell on me with the glare reserved for job candidates. His posture got a little stiffer. I knew where this was headed.
“And where do you fit in?” he asked. “You a lawyer?”
He said the last word with the same vitriol he’d used to express his views on law enforcement.
“Lo was a lawyer,” he added, then said, as if sensing my confusion, “before she got into the art thing.”
“Well, I’m not a lawyer,” I said. “But we can help you recover the money.”
“Who’s ‘we’ and how much do you charge for this so-called service?”
I made up a firm using my surname and the street I grew up on and then added “Associates” at the end to make it sound more legitimate.
“We take a third,” I explained.
Hearns didn’t look like someone who got fast ones pulled on him very often. And if he did, the perpetrator might end up regretting it. But I reasoned that lawyers take a third—at least that’s what legal dramas say—and that amount felt right. I didn’t want to get into the specifics of what exactly my firm did because I didn’t have a clue.
“That’s a big chunk. I could always get it myself,” he said.
“Maybe.”
“You know, we never officially got divorced,” he added, which was his way of asking me to confirm that he had a right to that money.
I didn’t oblige and simply nodded my head. I found that men like Mr. Hearns often had a deep insecurity around educated men. Their antagonism masked a disabling inferiority complex. It also made them surprisingly compliant.
“Who am I kidding,” he said, laughing. “Lois handled all the finances. Seventy percent of nothing is still nothing.”
“Sixty-six percent,” I corrected, and extended my hand. “We got a deal?”
He might as well have put my hand in his workshop’s vice, as I felt my knuckles fold over in his grip. But he then showed mercy by placing a very cold can of beer in my aching hand, pulled from the beat-up fridge on the far wall. I finally got my wish to crack a cold one—but we weren’t two old buds talking manifolds. We spoke instead about the topic men never talk about.
“I’d like to ask you some questions about your wife but want to be respectful…”
“Ex-wife,” he interrupted. “We’ve been separated for years,” he said with a wave of his hand, the sort of response someone gave who had fallen out of love a long time before. It was also the response of someone mortally wounded from loss who didn’t want to admit it. I let silence flush out which one it was.
“She developed a taste for tuna later in life,” he said, and then I knew my answer and just how painful the event had been to him. He had the bitterness of a spurned man, but it was the particularly acrid kind when that other someone isn’t a man but another woman.
“I know about the affair,” I said.
“You know about that old bag?” he said, which I assumed referenced Julie St. Jean.
“Yes, she’s the source of the potential money. How long had it been going on?”
“God only knows. A while.”
“You’ve met her?”
“I went to a party at her house once. Wasn’t for me—too much cheese and wine and craft-beer bullshit,” he answered. “Maybe Lois fell for the money, the lifestyle.”
The warm and inviting garage suddenly lost some of its charm.
“What kind of money did Lois make working for Power of One?”
“I don’t know what she made,” he said. “Lo handled all the finances…we never talked money.”
It was the second time he had said that.
“Did you still live together after you were separated? Establishing cohabitation, even legally separated, will help your cause.”
“Yeah, she never really left. She’d be gone for days, sometimes weeks. Then show back up. Just something we kind of worked out together.”
It didn’t sound like Hearns had a say in that agreement. I saw a man accepting of any deal that didn’t involve a clean break. At least that way there was always a chance, however slim, of rekindling what was long past snuffed out.
“But she lived here, no question about that. I got bills that can prove it,” he said, and made a move to go get them.
“It’s okay,” I tried, but Hearns ignored me.
I followed him out of the garage and into the front of his house. The living room was trimly decorated with a certain unclassifiable style. It was part tribal and part Americana.
“Nice place,” I said.
“Lo was the decorator,” he said, and shrugged like he didn’t much care for the decorations or decorating in general, but there was a vein of pride in his words.
Hearns led me into the kitchen, propped a large accordion file on the table, and riffled through the contents. While he searched for the documents, I spotted an unopened phone bill on the table.
“I got a gas bill with her name on it,” he said, handing me a bill notice. “Here’s water and sanitation,” he added as he shoved another my way.
“This should be sufficient,” I told him.
As we made our way to the door, I tucked the documents under my coat to keep them from getting wet. The rain was starting again and I thought about the quick run back to my car.
“Thanks for the beer,” I said, stepping down into the rain. “I’ll be in touch.”
“You know the cops thought I killed her,” he proffered. I turned to look back at him. Hearns stared out at the darkness like he had forgotten I was there. “How could they ever think that?” His voice quavered.
I left him there in the doorway and went back to my car. I drove past several houses, then pulled into an open space and got out in the rain. For a guy who didn’t know anything about the couple’s finances, he certainly kept very thorough records of them. I headed back toward the house.
I could see his work boots shuffling about through the opening in the garage door. I quietly moved past it toward the front entrance. The screen door was stuck and I had to give a gentle yank. The clatter of the rain masked whatever sounds I made. With one eye on the garage, I stepped into the house and fumbled in the dark toward the kitchen table.
The accordion file was still there. The unopened phone bill lay next to it on the table. If the couple hadn’t made a clean break, as Hearns had stated, then the phone bill would contain a log of calls made both by him and his ex-wife—very valuable information when trying to piece together the timeline leading up to Lois’s murder.
I slipped the envelope into my coat and headed back out.
Passing the garage again, I no longer saw the work boots and my stomach churned at the thought of a confrontation with Hearns. I didn’t think I could outrun him in the rain wearing loafers.
I stepped over a river of water pouring from a downspout and passed a small window permanently covered by a cheap, plastic blind. Through one of the missing slats I spied Hearns leaning against his workbench, his eyes fixed on the floor, and his hand wrapped around another can of beer. He took a long pull, long enough to finish the entire thing. But whatever he hoped for it to do, it didn’t succeed. He shook his head hopelessly and moved toward the old fridge.
He had the look of someone determined to get drunk. I felt a pang of guilt for intruding on whatever nightly routine he carried out in the quiet of his sanctuary. I slowly stepped back but kept an eye on the slat just in case he caught the movement outside.
I stopped.
Hearns was at the fridge but he didn’t pull out another can of beer. Instead, he opened the freezer, moved aside some blocks of frozen steaks, and pulled a thin package wrapped in plastic from the back. I couldn’t see exactly what it was because he had his back to me. But I watched him unwrap it and discard the plastic.
Then I watched him shove a sheaf of large bills into his jeans’ back pocket.