As Kate and Taylor left the station to check out the remaining names on Dory Quillin’s john list, Taylor was whistling cheerfully. Kate knew the reason for his good humor: there were only these last interviews to conduct, the trip to Modesto tomorrow, and then the basic investigation of the Dory Quillin homicide would be complete. The case would begin its inexorable fade into pseudo life, the file proceeding through a review process beginning with Jake Belliard, the D-3 in charge of the homicide table, and involving Lieutenant Burke and other superior officers; then it would be relegated to limbo—to a permanent open file containing all unsolved homicides, to be granted conditional life only during periodic review and when its basic data, entered in computer files, matched a new and similar crime.
She was not consoled by the fact that unsolved cases were a small percentage of homicides overall, that most persons who died at the hands of another were victims of someone they knew, and that competent and careful investigations inevitably led to arrests and convictions. Unable to distract or soothe herself even with thoughts of Andrea, she glared out the window of the Plymouth, struggling to conceal her rising anger at Taylor.
His attitude toward an unsuccessful investigation could always be plotted on a predictable curve: as his hope waned, so did his interest. He did everything necessary—after all, no obvious stone could be left unturned when a major crime case file was subject to close supervisory scrutiny—but he went through the motions, carried out his duties with minimal competence, his mental machinery operating in low gear. And an uninterested detective, she raged, could miss possibilities, could miss subtleties and nuances that suggested new leads…
As Taylor, whistling “Country Roads,” drove them through the smog and overcast, through the clogged auto and pedestrian traffic of downtown L.A., she maintained her baleful silence.
* * *
All the interviews were located in office buildings within a ten-block area around Seventh and Flower streets, and by early afternoon she and Taylor had reached the final entry on Dory Quillin’s list.
Pembroke Investments, Inc. occupied the eighth and ninth-floors of an office building on Flower. The spacious ninth floor office of securities analyst Gabriel Koerner had a view, albeit distant, of delicate white buildings on a green hilltop—the graceful Grecian architecture of the Music Center. Despite the presence of three phones on Koerner’s desk—a conventional instrument and two large consoles with constantly flashing lights—the office seemed quiet, almost hushed. Koerner’s eyes, Kate noted, darted constantly to the two consoles.
Koerner was small and thin, with sandy hair which had receded substantially; he was in his early thirties, perhaps younger. He wore a gray satin-backed vest unbuttoned over a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows; his loosened maroon-striped tie hung with its tails askew. In sharp contrast to the guarded, resentful reception of the other men on Dory Quillin’s list, he had welcomed the detectives with a smile and friendly handshake, waving them to the two leather armchairs in front of his desk.
“Sorry to disturb you, I see this is a busy day,” Kate said as she sat down, seeing his eyes shift once more to the consoles.
He chuckled. “No, just one hell of a busy morning.” He glanced down as if remembering his attire, and tightened the knot of his tie, began to button his vest. “The market’s closed, I’m still decompressing.” His voice resonated with energy and optimism. “What a morning, another big move in the Dow. If you two aren’t playing the market you should be.”
Taylor said drily, “I happen to have a spare twenty.”
“Fifty thousand’s our usual—” Koerner’s blue eyes scanned Taylor’s polyester jacket and pants. “Yeah, well…” He finished buttoning his vest and then gave Taylor a wary smile. “So how can I help you?”
Koerner cast the merest flick of a glance at the photo Kate placed on his leather-topped desk. “Dory Quillin.”
Kate looked at him sharply. To the other men on the list the woman in the photo had been merely “Dory”—if they mentioned a name at all.
“Yeah,” Koerner said, “I heard you were asking questions.”
“Who told you?” Taylor commanded.
“Dickie Fishlin,” Koerner said immediately and agreeably.
Kate thought back. Fishlin had been perhaps their sixth or seventh interview; he had said nothing unusual, had been neither more nor less cooperative than anyone else.
“Dickie told me about her maybe a year or so ago, said she was… Look, I’ve got nothing to hide, not a thing.” He raised his hands palms up and offered an easy smile. “Sure I met her. Sure I knew what she had for sale. But nothing happened. In fact, it was just the damnedest thing…”
He swung around to his credenza, poured pale yellow liquid from a crystal pitcher into a matching crystal glass. “Pineapple juice,” he explained. “Can I get you both something? Some of this? We have coffee out there,” he added, inclining his head toward the closed office door as if toward a place he disdained.
Both detectives shook their heads. “Thank you,” Kate added. Taylor’s arms were crossed; he was eyeing three silver sailing trophies on Koerner’s credenza.
“I drink this stuff all the time. No coffee, no drugs, a drink or two at night, that’s it. Don’t smoke, don’t allow it in here, either. Who needs it? Having a stock do what you’ve told investors it’ll do, if there’s any bigger—”
“Why was your meeting with Dory Quillin the damnedest thing?” Taylor interrupted, flipping open his notebook. Kate could see that he detested Gabriel Koerner.
“Because I knew her only about five minutes. And it was one weird five minutes. I can tell you every single word we said to each other. I met her in the bar at the Bonaventure last Thursday night at seven o’clock.”
Kate stared at him, dismayed. Why had it not occurred to her that the last man—the newest man—on Dory Quillin’s list might also have been the last to see her alive?
“At ten after seven, I should say. I was on time, she was late. Her name was Dory and she’d be wearing white—that’s all I knew. And then in she comes and I tell you she was…well, Dickie said she—I mean, she was a knockout. White pants, a white silk shirt, young, blond, slim as a pencil, I didn’t really believe it when Dickie told me, but—I still can’t believe she turned up dead just three days later. Somebody killed her, right?”
“Correct,” Taylor said in a tone that forbade further questions.
Koerner shook his head, picked up his crystal glass. “So anyway she sits down, I’m still catching my breath. I say hello, how are you, and then I suggest dinner at the hotel.” He drained his juice, looked brightly at the detectives. “They have this terrific restaurant—” He broke off, apparently seeing something in Taylor’s face. “Then the cocktail waitress is right there wanting to know what the young lady would like to drink. She orders a tall vodka and tonic, and the waitress asks for ID which I can’t blame her for.”
With his eyes averted Koerner picked up the photo of Dory Quillin lying on his desk and handed it to Kate. “Put this away, okay? Anyway, she gets out her wallet and shows it to the waitress and then she says something else about her drink, wanting something in it besides lime—I forget. Her wallet’s lying open on the table, so I take a look at her driver’s license, curious, you know? And I see her last name is Quillin.”
Koerner turned around, poured more pineapple juice; Taylor glanced at Kate, rolling his eyes in disgust.
Koerner said, “Quillin is kind of an uncommon name, you know, so I tell her I remember a Quillin from years ago in my hometown. But this Quillin was not such a terrific guy—he got run out of town for molesting little girls.”
Kate sat up abruptly in her chair.
“When was this?” Taylor exclaimed.
Kate recovered herself. “Ed, let him finish his story first. Then what happened, Mr. Koerner?”
“Christ, what’s going on here? You two look as shocked as she did. She asked where I was from and I told her Summerville—that’s a little town on the outskirts of Fresno.” Fresno. In Central California…
“So then she wants to know about the little girls, what all that was about. Hell, I couldn’t remember all that much, it was twenty-some-odd years ago, you know? I was like nine years old. This Quillin guy’d been operating in Kennedy Memorial Park, he molested I don’t know how many little girls before they caught him.”
Quillin was arrested. And booked…
“Paula Jankowski, she was one of them, she lived right down the block from me. Her parents were old country Polaks, they wouldn’t let her go near a courtroom. But Paula’s father—hell, I’m getting ahead of myself. Anyway, this Quillin guy goes on trial in Fresno—that’s the county seat—”
He was prosecuted, there was a trial record…
“Nearly as I can remember there was all kinds of commotion with the parents about the little girls testifying.”
Kate thought: How could I have been so stupid not to recognize Dory’s numbers? Me of all people—how could I have been so goddam stupid?
As Koerner paused to drink more juice, Taylor asked, “Do you know this Quillin’s first name?”
Koerner shook his head. “She asked me too. I can’t remember.”
“Ever see this guy?”
“She asked me that, too. Nope, I just heard all kinds of stories, it was all the town talked about that whole summer.”
“How about a picture of him in the paper?”
Again Koerner shook his head. “This was ’sixty-four, don’t forget. Stuff like that didn’t get headlines like all this McMartin preschool business today. I don’t remember—either the guy was acquitted or maybe the parents wouldn’t go through with having their kids testify—but he got off. And that’s when Paula’s father met the guy outside the courtroom and laid his face open before anybody could drag him away.”
The scar on Roland Quillin’s cheekbone…
“Quillin took the hint and hightailed it out of town,” Koerner concluded.
Taylor asked, “How did Dory Quillin react when you told her all this?”
“Took off running like those white clothes were on fire. And that was the last I saw of her. Christ was I embarrassed. The people in that bar looked at me like—”
“Mr. Koerner,” Kate said, “is there anything else you can add to what you’ve told us? Anything else Dory Quillin said? Or did?”
Koerner shook his head to each of the questions. “Nope, that’s it. That’s everything I know.”
Kate nodded to Taylor, and rose. “We’ll want a formal signed statement from you,” she said as she walked across the office to the door. “We’ll be back in touch.”
“A statement? Hey, wait a minute!”
Kate closed the door on him.
“Son of a gun,” Taylor said, striding across the lobby to the bank of elevators. “Let’s hear it for routine police work.”
She was too elated to indulge in sarcasm. “That page of numbers in Dory’s van, Ed—have you figured out what they mean yet?”
“Nope. But I’ve sure figured out a few other things.”
An elevator arrived as Gabriel Koerner burst through his office door. “Wait a minute! I have nothing to do with this!”
Taylor gave him a cheery wave as the elevator doors closed. “What about the numbers, Kate?”
“You’ll see graphically in just a few minutes, Ed. Twenty minutes from now we’ll learn by computer what Dory Quillin had to take a two-hundred-mile trip to find out.”
“I’m telling you the truth, Kate, I thought all the stuff about Dory’s father was so much horseshit. I thought Dory made all of it up so she had an excuse for everything she felt like doing.”
“I can see how you could think that,” Kate conceded. The elevator doors opened at the main floor. “But you were right about the one thing I never considered for a minute—that the Quillins were possibles.”