Kate parked the Plymouth on Washington Boulevard in front of Wilshire Division’s impound garage.
Taylor climbed dispiritedly out of the car and tucked the tail of his yellow sport shirt into his pants, having tossed his jacket and tie onto the backseat. En route he had growled his opinion that this case was a big fat waste of time and would produce a big fat zero for their efforts, and had since lapsed into glumness.
The Volkswagen van was in the last garage of the row along the rear of the lot. “Baker,” Kate called as she and Taylor entered the metal building, “we’re going in.”
The fingerprint man worked in the front of the van, his bald head very still over the tape he was applying to a latent print on the dashboard. Gray fingerprint powder lay over every exposed surface. He did not reply or lift his head until he had carefully peeled off the transparent tape with its preserved fingerprint. “Help yourself,” he snapped.
Kate stepped up into the open side door of the van, brushing at particles of fingerprint powder already clinging to her tan jacket and pants. Taylor moved past her, over to the makeshift shelving at the rear of the van, to look down at the bag of dry cat food under the bottom shelf. “Wonder what happened to the cat,” he said.
Kate was at the white Formica table Dory Quillin had used as a desk; it was covered with gray fingerprint powder. She opened its single drawer. Visible were five one-hundred-dollar bills fanned across the bottom of the drawer, and three clear plastic bags of white powder.
“Coke,” Taylor announced from beside her. “Couple of ounces, wouldn’t you say?”
“Looks like it,” Kate said shortly.
“Drugs,” Taylor said. “So far our angel-faced victim is into women, men, and now drugs. Maybe she was a porno star on the side.”
Kate heard bitterness in the sarcasm; and she realized that he felt the same sense of having been taken in by Dory Quillin that she did.
Taylor pointed to the money. “The C-notes, payoff money from johns.”
“Probably,” Kate agreed. “Same with the coke. These days it’s the same as money. Ed, if she was making hundred-dollar bills and bags of coke, she wasn’t getting her clients off the street.”
“Nope.” He rested a hand on the holster at his belt. “Kate,” he said eagerly, “if she was turning hundred-dollar tricks maybe she had some big shot john she was shaking down.”
Deliberately encouraging his renewed enthusiasm, she offered, “A very good motive for murder, Ed.” Why not, she thought resignedly. Let’s add blackmail to the list.
Taylor nodded. “The place doesn’t look disturbed. If she kept that money and coke here, maybe she’s got a list of johns somewhere.”
“Maybe.” She picked up a yellow legal pad which had been lying face down on the table.
“What the hell,” Taylor muttered.
Kate stared at three huge, heavily inked blocks of black print:
S285
S288
S290
Each letter and number was perhaps four inches high by two inches wide; the three blocks filled all but the top of the page. She was reminded of her own habit of drawing outlines of arrows and then filling them in. But none of the absent-minded doodles she made while thinking were ever so large and arresting as these blocks of print which seemed to shout from the page.
Intrigued, puzzled, she decided to book the pad as evidence. For her own reference she recorded the letters and numbers in her notebook, noticing that each S was decidedly misshapen, with a thickening at its downward curve; she carefully duplicated the shape. She peered at fragments of paper clinging to the top of the pad, the uncapped pen lying next to the pad. “A page is ripped out,” she said. “Ed, I think all this could mean something.”
“Yeah,” Taylor said uninterestedly. He bent to one knee to examine paperbacks stacked on the floor along the side of the table.
Distracted from the legal pad, Kate asked with more than professional curiosity, “What kind of books are they?”
“Novels,” Taylor answered. He picked up one after another. “Loving Her, Gaywyck, The Lesbian Path—Jesus, here’s one called Old Dyke Tales.”
“I get the picture,” Kate said with a grin, thinking that she would like to read any of those books herself. She leaned closer to the yellow legal pad, examining it.
“Baker,” she called, “could you come back here for a minute and dust something for us?”
With an assenting grunt Baker climbed out of the front of the van.
Kate pointed. “The top of this page, could you bring the imprint up from the previous page?”
Baker immediately crouched, his eyes level with the table top, and brushed gray dust across the top of the yellow paper. Kate could clearly see: June. 15, 1985, and below that, at the left-hand margin, the letters De beginning a word which was cut off by the blocks of writing.
“The fifteenth was Saturday,” Kate said. “The ripped out page may be around here somewhere.”
“No way,” Baker bristled. “Her trash bag is between the front seats. Nothing in it but Kleenex.”
“Why would it be here?” challenged Taylor. “Those letters—” He gestured to the pad, “—they could be the first two letters of ‘Dear.’ Maybe she was writing somebody a letter and she mailed it.”
“Very true,” Kate said, pleased with him.
“And how do we know she wrote it Saturday? She could’ve put that date on it anytime.”
“Also true,” Kate conceded. “Look, Ed, the pad’s new—that ripped out page is the first one. I think she was at this desk making this page of whatever-it-is just before she was killed. See how some of the last number isn’t quite filled in? And look at the pen—the cap’s off.”
“Kate, lots of people leave caps off pens.”
Kate picked up the pen. “This one’s ink. With a razor point felt tip, which is why the imprint shows on the page beneath. People don’t leave caps off felt tip pens.”
“But she was outside the van when she bought it.”
“Somebody came to the van while she was sitting here, she came out—”
“I’ll leave you two gumshoes,” Baker said acidly. “Some of us don’t have time to stand around and theorize.”
Kate grinned as he stalked to the door to return to his work. The irascible Baker was an excellent fingerprint technician. “Ed,” she said, “maybe you’re right about that list of johns, maybe it’s here somewhere. Let’s take a close look. I’ll check out the wicker trunk.”
She unhooked the lid, lifted it. On top, carefully folded, lay a snowy white silk shirt and white silk pants, two pairs of white silk bikini panties, and two matching lace bras, their cup size quite small.
Kate fingered the soft fabric of the shirt. This had to be the clothing Dory Quillin wore to her sexual rendezvous. She had found her ticket off Hollywood Boulevard by understanding—instinctively or otherwise—basic male fantasies. In this white clothing she was young and virginal, she would be many men’s fantasies of an angelic young girl—or a young boy.
Other clothing also lay neatly folded in the trunk: conventional panties and bras, socks, shorts, tank tops, jeans, T-shirts, sweatshirts. Clothing the real Dory Quillin wore, Kate thought. These silk garments were a costume, a disguise, a game, a pretense…
She shrugged in exasperation. Again she was romanticizing, again she was constructing a persona from an expression she had perceived in the spectral silver-blue eyes of a dead girl. If anyone should be objective about Dory Quillin, it should be her—the detective in charge of investigating her murder.
From beneath the clothing Kate extracted a white shoulder bag of canvas and plastic weave, streamers hanging from its flap—a teenager’s purse. Its contents were neatly arranged, and obviously undisturbed.
Kate used her pen to move objects for a better view.
There was a wallet, a long-handled comb, a brush, a compact, a case containing—according to its label—azure eyeshadow, a purse-size package of Kleenex, another pen like the one on the desk, and a small spiral notebook which Kate fished out and opened.
It was not, as she had hoped, an address book. Only the first page of the notebook contained writing:
S285
S288
S290
These had been scrawled, as if in haste or agitation.
Kate pulled out the wallet, a simple folded leather case much like her own, with a pocket for currency, a window showing a driver’s license, and several slots for credit cards.
The driver’s license showed an unsmiling, off-center photo of Dory Quillin, and a birthdate of 05-03-63; she had been passing herself off as twenty-two. Kate leafed through the currency: a twenty, a five, six ones; the credit card slots held a dozen or so business cards, and a folded sheet of paper.
“Ed,” she said softly.
Taylor turned from inspecting the shelves of Dory Quillin’s food provisions. Whistling tunelessly, he examined the business cards Kate spread across the table, and the additional piece of paper she smoothed out; it listed nine names and phone numbers.
“Bingo,” he said. “Look at the titles on these business cards, Kate. Execs from General Electric, Wells Fargo, Arco, Bank of America,” he read, “AT&T, GTE—that’s a nice touch, she used both phone companies. Alcoa—that’s a nice touch too, maybe they made the bat. Twentieth Century Fox, NBC-TV. And looky here, Kate. Smith Barney. Where she made money the old-fashioned way.”
Kate smiled ruefully, then ran a finger down the list of names and numbers on the paper. “It could be interesting, checking these numbers out.”
“I’m betting they’re more listings from the Fortune 500.” Taylor added cheerfully, “It’s a cinch we’re gonna have some red-faced captains of industry.”
Kate showed him the notebook. “Identical to what’s on the legal pad. I think this could mean something important, Ed.”
“My bet is, it means shit. Only in novels do victims leave death messages.”
“You could be right,” Kate conceded. “But I have a feeling… There’s a lot of work here, Ed. Checking out these new leads, talking again to the women at the Nightwood Bar, Dory’s parents. Now that the news has sunk in.”
“A return trip to the Nightwood Bar,” Taylor said. “This time I wear my bulletproof vest.”
“It might be better if I do it solo,” Kate suggested with a grin. “I’m not welcome there either, but I fit in a little better than a patriarchal pig.”
“Oink growl,” Taylor said good-naturedly, and returned to the search of Dory Quillin’s van.