Kate drove up La Brea toward West Hollywood, Taylor beside her. The familiar street was silent and deserted at this hour on a Sunday night except for a few cars in clusters dictated by traffic lights. She focused on the street instead of the coming task: notifying the Quillin family of the homicide of their daughter.
She glanced at Robaire’s, a French restaurant between Beverly and Wilshire, incongruous amid the fluttering flags of new and used car lots and auto supply houses and a supermarket. She had not, she realized, had dinner. Above Beverly she watched the street steadily improve into tidy graphics shops, film businesses, a ballet school—except for one dilapidated remainder of days past: Pink’s, a hot dog stand to which Taylor had once lured her, proclaiming it the best in the city and a historical landmark as well. Kate remembered a historical attack of indigestion.
As they approached Santa Monica Boulevard, Kate’s thoughts returned to the women of the Nightwood Bar. “By the way,” she said to Taylor, “what did Patton say to you at the door?”
“Nothing much.” Then Taylor growled, “What the hell is a patriarchal pig?”
Kate laughed.
“Gimme a break, Kate.”
“Look it up in the dictionary, Ed.”
The intersection they approached was not unusual—a Carl’s Jr. on one corner a Thrifty Drug across from it, a carwash on another corner, a McDonald’s just a little further up the block—except for the blue sign which announced: WEST HOLLYWOOD.
Kate had not been here since the election in November when the area had incorporated itself; this intersection now formed a boundary of the most unusual new city in America, with three gay members elected to its five-person city council, one of them now serving as the mayor pro tem.
She turned onto Santa Monica Boulevard. At eleven o’clock this Sunday night considerable pedestrian traffic moved along each side of the street, mostly men strolling in pairs. Beside her, Taylor shifted his buttocks, his head raised and alert as if he were inhaling new and somewhat suspect air.
“One more year,” he muttered. “Then Marie and me, we’re moving our butts out of this goddamn looney bin of a town.”
“Orange County, I presume.”
“Further on down toward San Diego,” Taylor answered, missing her sarcasm as she knew he would. “Maybe I’ll learn to play golf. Grow avocados.”
“Exciting, Ed.”
“Shit on excitement.”
Kate did not answer. They had reached Holloway Drive and she was looking out at the median strip dividing Santa Monica Boulevard. She peered ahead as far as she could see. Flagpoles, perhaps twenty feet high and set perhaps the same distance apart, held small flags, each of a different nation, each whipping smartly in the late night breeze. She was moved by these vestiges of last summer’s Olympic games, and the memory of those few exalted days when the sun-splashed city had seemed cleaner, brighter, more glistening than usual, when classic athletes from around the globe had symbolized the best in the human species and had made her briefly forget that dark side she constantly saw.
They passed the sheriff’s station on San Vicente, still the law enforcement agency for West Hollywood; then restaurants and nightclubs: Dan Tana’s, La Masia, the Troubadour. “We’re almost to Beverly Hills,” Kate grumbled. “Where is this place?”
“Turn right on Doheny,” Taylor said, consulting the map. “Christ, listen to these street names, Kate. Harland, Keith, Lloyd—this city, even the streets have boys’ names. Jesus, here’s one called Dicks.”
“Gay or straight, the whole world discriminates against women,” Kate said good-humoredly. She was looking at the large dark shapes of apartment buildings along Doheny and across at a row of royal palms, craning to see the majestic height of them; but their tops were invisible in the darkness.
“Turn right,” Taylor ordered.
Kate cruised slowly down the block. Hemmed in by the large buildings on Doheny and the commerce on Santa Monica, the well-lighted neighborhood was a labyrinth of streets so narrow that parking was allowed on one side only. All the houses were small and of individual design, many Spanish style, most with barred windows. All were built forward on their lots, leaving miniscule patches of lawn, some fenced in with low stone barriers. Shrubbery was scarce—a few low trees, some carefully sculptured bushes. The small houses and narrow streets reminded Kate of Venice on her own side of town.
The windows of the Quillin house were entirely barred, including a side window a five-year-old child could not wriggle through. The foundation of the house and the sidewalk leading to the street were lined with rose bushes, their blooms in various stages of fullness and decay; as Kate made her way along the pathway of roses she saw an assortment of plastic ducks reposing on the loam between the bushes.
“Planning on a few ducks among your avocado trees?” Kate joked through a clenched jaw. She had glanced in the barred front window at a scene of domestic peace—a husband and wife watching the eleven o’clock news.
“Naw, maybe a few chickens.” Taylor pressed the doorbell, stood back, smoothed his jacket, inhaled an audible breath. Kate was aware of the sweet scent of roses amid the faint metallic smell of smog.
“Who is it?” The voice was high-pitched, tremulous.
“Police, ma’am,” Taylor answered. “If you’ll step to your front window we’ll be glad to show you identification.”
Kate heard the rasp of a safety chain. The woman who opened the front door was fiftyish, her body’s thin shapelessness clad in a yellow cotton dress. Her washed-out blue eyes fixed themselves on Kate.
Kate extended her badge and ID. “Detective Delafield, Los Angeles Police Department. This is my partner, Detective Taylor. May we come in, please?”
The woman’s hand went to her throat. It was the veined hand of a seventy-year-old.
“God yes, come in,” said the barrel-chested man who had come up behind her; he wore a green plaid bathrobe. “Let’s not let the whole neighborhood in on this, whatever it is.”
Kate and Taylor walked into the living room. Taylor asked, “May we sit down?” He took a chair without waiting for a reply. Kate sat in an armchair across from him.
“It’s about Dolores,” the woman said, sinking heavily into the sofa. The man looked toward a corduroy-covered recliner, then sat down beside her.
Kate cleared her throat. “You’re the parents of Dolores Marie Quillin?”
“I’m Roland Quillin, this is my wife Flora.” He leaned toward them, his shoulders slumped. “What has she done now?”
“We’re sorry to have to inform you,” Kate said evenly, “that she was killed early this evening.”
Roland Quillin reached for his wife’s hand; husband and wife stared at each other.
“I’m truly sorry,” Kate added in the same even voice.
“My condolences to both you folks,” Taylor said solemnly.
Kate felt her familiar sensation of wishing she could be anywhere on earth except where she was. She had delivered similar messages in her thirteen years in police work, and always her feeling was the same: that she was an intruder on the most private, the most sacred of emotions. That day a year and ten months ago when she was informed in the captain’s office at Wilshire Division of Anne’s death, she herself had craved only solitude, to be in a dark cave in some faraway place, to curl her pain-wracked body into a tight ball…
“Roland…”
Flora Quillin’s mouth worked, almost with a life of its own—a small mouth with a delicacy Dory Quillin had inherited, and apparently all she had inherited.
Kate stared at lank, chemically uniform blond hair, at pallid skin pulled tightly over a thin-featured face, at raw-boned arms, at the nondescript yellow dress, at canvas espadrilles on bare, blue-veined feet. Flora Quillin seemed an especially cruel caricature of her daughter.
“Flora, we knew it would happen…God we knew it.”
Roland Quillin’s eyes had slowly widened until the whites showed all around the irises. They were blue eyes, deeper blue than either his wife’s or his daughter’s. In his early sixties, he was nearly bald, with a shapeless nose and deep creases around his eyes. A barely perceptible scar lay along a freshly shaven cheekbone, the scar slightly curved, one a knife slash might have made years ago, Kate thought. Irritation from the recent shaving had probably given it this much visibility.
She was momentarily disconcerted when Roland Quillin’s eyes suddenly intercepted hers, interrupting her concentrated scrutiny of him.
He said slowly, distinctly, “Dolores hasn’t been a daughter to us for a long time.”
She’s dead, Kate wanted to scream at him, your daughter’s dead! How could anything else matter now? Three-quarters of her life had been taken away…
Taylor spoke: “May we ask why that happened, sir?”
Roland Quillin crossed his arms across the plaid robe. “Check your records at LAPD,” he said flatly.
Again he looked at his wife, who stared back at him. “Flora,” he said softly, “it’s a blessing. It’s God’s will.”
Kate said quietly, “Mr. Quillin, we know these are painful circumstances. But we’d appreciate knowing what we’ll find.”
Roland Quillin’s arms tightened across his chest.
Andrea Ross had mentioned cocaine, Kate mused, watching his thin mouth pinch downward. Perhaps Dory Quillin had gotten into serious trouble with drugs.
“Prostitution,” he said.
Assimilating this new information, Kate sat back in her armchair, rubbing her hands along its smooth fabric, angry with herself at her shock. She was too experienced in police work—and too old for God’s sake—to be deceived by the white-clad innocence of that young body, those bewildered silver-blue eyes. She felt unreasoning anger at Dory Quillin. That face in death had conveyed betrayal. She herself now felt betrayed.
Taylor said, “Sounds like she was quite a trial for you folks.”
Kate added a nod of agreement. Taylor’s sympathetic tone and approach, regardless of its genuineness, was effective police procedure.
Roland Quillin asked, “What happened to her?”
Not trusting the tact of Taylor’s reply, Kate answered, “It appears that it was a single blow of…a blunt instrument.”
Flora Quillin asked in a tremulous voice, “Do you think she…suffered?”
“I don’t believe so,” Kate said gently, pitying her. Who could ever know what Dory Quillin had felt? “We received the initial report around six o’clock. Our best estimate is that she was…deceased shortly before that time.”
Roland Quillin asked in a tone of intense bitterness, “Was it one of her customers? Or one of her female…companions?”
Kate said, “Sir, at this point we’re still piecing our information together.”
Taylor opened his notebook. “We do need an official identification, we’ll need one or both of you to—”
“No,” Roland Quillin said.
“Sir?” Taylor looked up in surprise.
“No,” he repeated. “We don’t want to see her.”
“Mrs. Quillin—” Kate began.
“I couldn’t bear to look at her.” The words were uttered in a whisper.
Kate exchanged a glance with Taylor, who raised an eyebrow almost imperceptibly. Agonized by what she was witnessing in this room, she said quietly, “You had her fairly late in life, Mrs. Quillin.”
“I was thirty-five, yes.”
The voice was soft, the words slightly inflected. Southern, Kate guessed. Maybe Texas. She asked, “Do you have other children?”
“Just her. I wasn’t the same after that, never quite well, I’m still not well, you know… And she was a colicky child, trouble, she was so much trouble. More and more trouble, she was such a rebel, she was sick in her head, she…” She looked helplessly at Kate, then at her husband.
“Ran off at fourteen,” he said. “Gone two weeks the first time. You people found her in Hollywood. Arrested her. In one of those…motels.” He added, “We took her back—that time.” He raised his hands in a gesture of futility.
“Fourteen, only fourteen she was,” Flora Quillin said. “What did she know about anything? She was sick in her head by then. But she always claimed to know everything. From the time she was ten. Full of the wildest tales, you never knew when she was telling the truth about anything. Why one time she—”
“She left twice more,” Roland Quillin cut in. “Wouldn’t tell us what she’d been doing after she decided to come back home. But all that money she had, we knew. Sixteen years old, wild as a coyote…”
Kate said in a soft tone, “From what you said earlier, Mr. Quillin, you also knew your daughter was a lesbian.”
“That was the last straw,” Roland Quillin told them. “Not bad enough she had to turn herself into a common streetwalker—”
Flora Quillin asked, “Could I perhaps get you detectives something to drink? There’s coffee already made.”
“Appreciate it,” Taylor said. “Black, please.” Kate shook her head no. She could not eat or drink anything in this house.
Kate’s eyes followed Flora Quillin, and then took in the room—a room reminiscent of her own growing up and the houses of childhood friends she had not thought of in years. The sofa and matching armchairs were of bright floral chintz, the coffee table and end tables of maple, with the blockiness of early-American furniture popular during the fifties. Over the corduroy-covered recliner an ornate green lampshade hung from a hook; the room’s other two lamps had bases of milk glass, and fluted shades. Beige shag carpeting was protected by area rugs in front of the sofa, the recliner, and leading from the living room into the other rooms of the house. A maple hutch, visible in the dining room, was crammed with dishes and knickknacks. A sewing bag on a maple dining room chair spilled out knitting in shades of red. On the far wall of the dining room a cross hung next to a small framed reproduction of St. Francis feeding the birds.
Flora Quillin handed a steaming mug of coffee to Taylor, and placed a coaster on the coffee table. Taylor set the mug carefully on the coaster.
Kate asked, “How long has it been since you…gave up on your daughter?”
“Two years ago?” Roland Quillin inquired of his wife. “Was that when she brought home that…that…and told us they were…”
“The woman was black,” Flora Quillin said to Kate. “Twenty years older than Dolores and black besides. It was nearly the death of us. Everything, that sick child did everything to humiliate and hurt us, it was like she stayed up nights thinking of ways.”
“I can see that she was a trial to you,” Kate said. “How old was she by then?”
“Seventeen.”
Four hours ago when she died Dory Quillin had been nineteen years old…
“Where,” Roland Quillin asked wearily, “did this happen?”
Kate replied, “Her body was found in a parking lot on La Brea. Behind a place called the Nightwood Bar.”
“The Nightwood Bar,” Roland Quillin repeated. He rubbed his face with both hands. “She even had to die at a lesbian bar.”
Flora Quillin asked in a quavering voice, “Will all this be in the papers?”
“We don’t know ma’am,” Taylor answered. “Too hard to predict what the L.A. papers will decide to cover. We have homicides in the city every day—some never get in the papers at all.”
“We’ve lived in this house over twenty years,” Flora Quillin declared. “You can’t imagine what it’s been like having everyone know about Dolores. To have all those people pity you because your only child—”
Kate asked, “How is it that you know about her current activities if you don’t see her?”
Flora Quillin exchanged a glance with her husband. “She calls—called her mother,” Roland Quillin said. “Every so often.”
“She gets mail here sometimes,” Flora Quillin offered. “We forward it over to…that place. It’s the only address she’d give us.”
Taylor said, “Did you know she lived there in her van?”
Flora Quillin nodded. “Can you imagine such a thing? Roland is an accountant, a good decent man, we’ve been in this parish twenty years now, the people here are some of Roland’s best customers—”
Taylor broke in, “Do you have any idea about any friends or associates of hers we might talk to?”
“Of course not,” Roland Quillin said.
“Enemies?” Kate suggested. As the Quillins shook their heads she asked, “When was the last time she called here?”
Again the Quillins exchanged glances. “It was…not too recently,” Flora Quillin whispered.
“Could you be more specific?”
“Not recently…I don’t remember. I’m sorry.”
Kate stared at her. The evasiveness was transparent. But why? What could she possibly be hiding?
Flora Quillin addressed both detectives. “Do either of you have children?”
“Two boys,” Taylor answered. “Both of ’em grown and out on their own.”
“Happy Father’s Day,” Flora Quillin said.
Taylor’s smile was fleeting and uneasy; he flicked a glance at Roland Quillin who did not change expression. Kate looked on in surprise; she had been vaguely aware that Father’s Day was imminent but had not realized it was today.
Flora Quillin said to Taylor, “Maybe you think we’re dreadful parents—”
“Not at all, ma’am.”
“How would you feel if you had a daughter and by the time she was fourteen—”
Kate asked, “Did you try to get her professional help?”
“Of course we did.” Roland Quillin’s tone was sharp with bitterness. “That’s when she came home claiming to be a lesbian. Psychotherapy,” he said scathingly. “Where else would she get such garbage in her head? That’s when she found out how easy it was to blame us for everything.”
Kate turned to a new page in her notebook. “May we have the psychiatrist’s name?”
“Why?” Roland Quillin demanded. “What do you have to talk to her for?”
“We don’t know,” Kate said mildly. “Depending on how this investigation goes, we may not talk to her at all.”
“Marietta Hall,” said Flora Quillin. “She’s in Brentwood.”
Kate recorded the name, and rose. “We appreciate your courtesy under these circumstances. May we borrow a photo of Dory to use in our inquiries about her?”
“We don’t have any,” Flora Quillin said. “We didn’t want one thing of hers in this house.”
Judged and pronounced irredeemable at the age of seventeen. Kate turned away, sickened.
“And her name is Dolores,” Flora Quillin said.
“My apologies,” Kate said. “I understood she preferred to call herself Dory.”
“Just one more way she strayed from the upbringing of her parents and all the laws of God,” Roland Quillin said.
“Thank you, folks,” Taylor said. “Good night.”
The detectives got into the car, Taylor behind the wheel. He hunched over it, peering at the barred and darkened house; the lights had been turned off with their departure.
Taylor looked at Kate. “I’m trying to figure out what one of my boys would have to do for me to toss his ass permanently out on the street. I don’t know, Kate—what the hell do you do if your kid decides she’s gonna be a hooker on Hollywood Boulevard?”
“Ed, I don’t know. But can you just write off a child totally, like she was some kind of bad debt? They raised her from a baby …now you’d think she was no more than a dead fly.”
Taylor scowled at the house. “I think the Quillins are possibles.”
Kate looked at Taylor in astonishment.
“Kate, they have a motive—the way Dory fucked up their lives.”
“Be serious, Ed. From what Maggie Schaeffer said, and the Quillins’ own statements, the hatred was purely mutual. Besides, parents don’t kill their children.” She added grimly, “At least not physically.”
“Sometimes you damn well feel like it, Kate,” Taylor said earnestly, “the things they do. And a second is all it takes to pick up a baseball bat. And you saw the way that dead kid was, the look on her face—like she wanted to hug whoever offed her.”
“If they all hated each other—”
“I don’t buy that,” Taylor said. “Hating your own kid, your own flesh and blood—how can you buy that?”
“But why would they want to do anything to her now? This’s been going on since she was fourteen. They threw her out of their lives two years ago, all the damage she did was already done. Why now? What could’ve happened to make a difference now?”
Taylor shrugged. “Kate,” he said sadly, “I know some of them look real young and innocent, but how could anybody be a hooker and look like her?”
“I’m wondering myself,” Kate admitted.
“Christ, she looked like she’d never been touched.”
“Maybe she never felt like she was,” Kate said.
“I’ve heard…” Taylor said, and cleared his throat.
Another of his delicate questions, Kate thought. Part of the game they played where she knew that Taylor knew she was a lesbian, but neither of them discussed or admitted it—Taylor because he was obviously uncomfortable with the issue, and she because she was convinced that her professional efficiency depended on discretion and silence.
“I’ve heard that lots of prostitutes are actually lesbians,” he said.
“I’ve heard that too,” Kate said easily.
“Think it’s true?”
“Only if you subscribe to the theory that prostitutes actually hate men.”
“Do all lesbians hate men?”
How the hell should I know, Kate thought in irritation. Am I, for chrissakes, an expert on all lesbians who ever lived? “Some do,” she answered. “Some heterosexual women do, too.”
“But not you, right Kate?” Taylor asked innocuously. “You think men are okay, don’t you?”
“One or two of you,” Kate answered drily.
Taylor chuckled. With a final glance at the darkened Quillin house he pulled away from the curb.