She parked her truck close up behind Dan Munoz’s Chevrolet, climbed down from the cab and walked across the hot concrete driveway. Dan was waiting by the front door, talking to a wizened, seventyish man in a beige safari suit.
“Hi, Bonnie.”
“Hi, Dan. Nice necktie.”
“Thanks, it’s Armani. Bonnie—this is the landlord, George Keighley. He’s going to show you around the place so that you can give him a price. George, this is Bonnie Winter, the best cleanup lady in town. In fact she’s the cleanup queen.”
George Keighley gave a racking cough and acknowledged Bonnie with a nod. His skin was the color of oxidized liverwurst, and he had huge, hairy ears, like those of a Hobbit.
The house on Ivanhoe Drive was painted bright yellow with bright green shutters and a bright red roof, so that it looked as if its color scheme had been chosen by a six-year-old child. George Keighley led the way into the small entrance hall, which was stuffy and airless and inexplicably cluttered with five dining room chairs. Then they went through to the living area, an awkward L-shaped room that was furnished with ill-matched couches and armchairs and a 1960s coffee table with orange wooden balls for feet.
“Did you see this case on TV?” asked Dan.
“No, I didn’t. What happened?”
“The house was rented by a twenty-four-year-old guy called David Hinsey and his girlfriend, Maria Carranza, who was twenty-two. Hinsey worked for a TV repair company, and Carranza worked on the checkout at Kwik-Mart. They had a two-and-a-half-year-old son, Dylan. The trouble was, they couldn’t afford a baby-sitter, so before she went to work Carranza used to shut Dylan in a large cardboard grocery box and seal it with duct tape so that he couldn’t get out. She punched the box full of air holes, and she gave the kid a mug of orange juice and a pack of Oreos to eat. She left the television on, too, so that he could watch it through a little slit.”
“Oh, God,” said Bonnie. “How long was he left like that?”
“Six or seven hours at a stretch. Sometimes longer if Hinsey worked overtime. The neighbors didn’t even realize that he and Carranza had a kid.”
George Keighley said, “In here,” and coughed some more. He led the way past a musty-smelling bathroom with a pale green bath and a shower with a crack in the door, until they reached the main bedroom. “I’ve had to keep the windows closed in case of vandals, so it stinks some.”
He opened the door and Bonnie immediately smelled the rotting-chicken stench of decomposing blood. She stepped inside and looked around. The cheap orange drapes were all drawn so that it took a moment for her eyes to grow accustomed to the gloom. All the same, she felt at once that appalling atmosphere that characterized every trauma scene she ever walked into—the feeling that something unthinkable had happened here—a scenario straight from hell.
On one side of the room were two single beds, pushed close together. They had no bedding on them except for two worn-out mattresses with blue-ticking covers. Both mattresses were heavily stained with dark brown blood, and on the magnolia-colored wall behind them was a wild array of handprints and semicircular smears of dried blood and excrement.
Dan said, “The reason that Hinsey and Carranza couldn’t afford a baby-sitter was because they spent all of their earnings on speed and crack cocaine. Nobody will ever know what happened for sure, but it looks like Hinsey came home and found that Carranza had helped herself to his stash while he was at work. There was obviously an argument, a struggle, and Hinsey stabbed Carranza with a kitchen knife. Not just once, which would have been enough to kill her, but two hundred and seven times. All over. Even her face.”
“Then what?” asked Bonnie. She hunkered down on the pale green carpet so that she could examine a brown rectangular stain.
“Then Hinsey must have realized what he’d done and killed himself. Committed seppuku, as a matter of fact. Stabbed himself in the stomach, first this way, then that way, crisscross, so that his intestines fell out on the bed. The M.E. said it probably took him over three hours to die.”
“Messy,” said Bonnie.
Dan stood beside her as she raked her fingers through the stained carpet pile to see how deep it was and what it was made of. High polyester content, fortunately.
“Of course the kid was left in the cardboard box and couldn’t get out. He was in there for nearly a week before he died of dehydration. He was so hungry that he even ate pieces of cardboard.”
Bonnie stood up, too. “This was where the box was standing?” she asked, pointing down at the rectangular stain.
“That’s right. Nobody at the TV repair company bothered to find out why Hinsey hadn’t been into work because he was always so unreliable anyway. The same with Carranza. In the end Mr. Keighley came around for the monthly rent, and that was when they were found. The M.E. estimates that they were lying here dead for well over three weeks. The kid was swollen so much that he burst the box.”
Bonnie took a last look around the room. “This shouldn’t set you back too much, Mr. Keighley. I can dispose of the mattresses and clean the walls and the carpet for you. I can spray for coffin-fly infestation, too. Let’s say a round six hundred.”
“Six hundred? Jesus Christ. No wonder they call you the cleanup queen.”
“That’s the price, Mr. Keighley. You won’t find anybody else to touch it for less. In fact, you probably won’t be able to find anybody else to touch it at all.”
“You’re getting the very best here, sir,” said Dan, laying his hand on Bonnie’s shoulder.
Mr. Keighley blew out his cheeks. “Okay, then, if that’s what it takes. How soon can you do it?”
They watched George Keighley drive away in his elderly but highly polished black Cadillac.
“You know who that car used to belong to?” said Dan. “Neil Reagan—Ronnie’s older brother.”
“Ronald Reagan had an older brother?”
“Sure. Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Dan took out one of his bright green cigars. “Is there something different about you today?” he asked her.
“I don’t know. What do you mean?”
“You look different. I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe it’s your hair.”
Bonnie shrugged. But she knew what he was talking about. After her night in Pasadena, she definitely felt different. Intoxicated, almost.
She said, “There was something I wanted to talk to you about. I found some chrysalis kind of things at the Glass residence and some caterpillars at the Goodman apartment. I took one of the caterpillars up to Howard Jacobson at UCLA just to see what it was. He said it was a butterfly, but quite a rare kind of butterfly.”
“Well, I don’t know, really. But he said this particular butterfly has a bad reputation in Mexican folklore. It’s the daytime disguise of some evil goddess. She’s supposed to drive people crazy so that they kill the people they love the most.”
Dan lit his cigar and puffed out smoke. “So what are you telling me? Aaron Goodman was possessed? He ran a dry-cleaning business. Dry cleaners don’t get possessed.”
“No, of course not. But Howard said that you never find this butterfly outside of a certain part of Mexico. And there’s kind of a Mexican connection, isn’t there? There was a Mexican sugar skull at the Glass residence, wasn’t there? And there was a painting of Mexican guys in hats at the Marrin house. And the Goodmans had a Mexican maid.”
“Oh, sure. The Goodmans and a million-and-a-half other families in Los Angeles.”
“I’m not saying any of this means anything, but I thought you might be interested, that’s all.”
Dan said, “I’d rather leave the bugs and the maggots to you, sweet cheeks. Are you sure I can’t buy you dinner?”