He was in his early sixties and his cardiac problems had left his complexion looking sour. The usual bags under his eyes had turned a dark smokey shade, making his whole face seem sunken in circulatory gloom. He was apparently marking the time away from the department by shaving every other day, and this wasn’t the one. His face had tended to be pouchy in the best of times, but now his mouth was pulled down in a permanent expression of malcontent. Just my kind of guy.
I could tell he was still smoking because his raincoat, when he moved, smelled of nicotine. The last time I remembered seeing him he was in a hospital bed. The visit had been awkward. Up to that point, I’d always been intimidated by the man, but then I’d never seen him in a cotton hospital nightie with his puckered butt on display through a slit down the back. I’d felt friendlier toward him since. I knew he liked me despite the fact his manner in the past had alternated between surly and abrupt.
I said, “So what’s up? I can’t believe you walked all the way over here to give me decorating tips.”
“Actually, I’m on my way to lunch and thought you might join me—if you’re free, that is.”
I glanced at my watch. It was only 10:25. “Sure, I could do that. Let me get my bag and my jacket and I’ll meet you out in front.”
We took off on foot, walking to the corner, where we turned right and headed north on Santa Teresa Street. I thought we’d be going to the Del Mar or the Arcade, two restaurants where guys from the PD gravitated for lunch. Instead, we soldiered on for another three blocks and finally turned into a hole-in-the-wall known as “Sneaky Pete’s,” though the name on the entrance sign said something else. The place was largely empty: one couple at a table and a smattering of day drinkers sitting at the far end of the bar. Dolan took a seat at the near end and I settled myself on the stool to his left. The bartender laid her cigarette in an ashtray, reached for a bottle of Old Forrester, and poured him a drink before he opened his mouth. He paused to light a cigarette and then he caught my look. “What?”
“Well, gee, Lieutenant Dolan, I was just wondering if this was part of your cardiac rehabilitation.”
He turned to the bartender. “She thinks I don’t take very good care of myself.”
She placed the glass in front of him. “Wonder where she got that?”
I pegged her in her forties. She had dark hair that she wore pulled away from her face and secured by tortoiseshell combs. I could see a few strands of gray. Not a lot of makeup, but she looked like someone you could trust in a bartenderly sort of way. “What can I do for you?”
“I’ll have a Coke.”
Dolan cocked his thumb at me. “Kinsey Millhone. She’s a PI in town. We’re having lunch.”
“Tannie Ottweiler,” she said, introducing herself. “Nice to meet you.” We shook hands and then she reached down and came up with two sets of cutlery, encased in paper napkins, that she placed in front of us. “You sitting here?”
Dolan tilted his head. “We’ll take that table by the window.”
“I’ll be there momentarily.”
Dolan tucked his cigarette in his mouth, the smoke causing his right eye to squint as he picked up his whiskey and moved away from the bar. I followed, noting that he’d chosen a spot as far from the other drinkers as he could get. We sat down and I set my handbag on a nearby chair. “Is there a menu?”
He shed his raincoat and took a sip of whiskey. “The only thing worth ordering is the spicy salami on a kaiser roll with melted pepper jack. Damn thing’ll knock your socks off. Tannie puts a fried egg on top.”
“Sounds great.”
Tannie appeared with my Coke. There was a brief time-out while Dolan ordered our sandwiches.
As we waited for lunch, I said, “So what’s going on?”
He shifted in his seat, making a careful survey of the premises before his gaze returned to mine. “You remember Stacey Oliphant? He retired from the Sheriff’s Department maybe eight years back. You must have met him.”
“Don’t think so. I know who he is—everybody talks about Stacey—but he’d left the department by the time I connected up with Shine and Byrd.” Morley Shine had been a private investigator in partnership with another private eye named Benjamin Byrd. Both had been tight with the sheriff’s office. They’d hired me in 1974 and trained me in the business while I acquired the hours I needed to apply for my license. “He must be in his eighties.”
Dolan shook his head. “He’s actually seventy-three. As it turns out, being idle drove him out of his mind. He couldn’t handle the stress so he went back to the SO part-time, working cold cases for the criminal investigations division.”
“Nice.”
“That part, yes. What’s not nice is he’s been diagnosed with cancer—non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. This is the second time around for him. He was in remission for years, but the symptoms showed up again about seven months ago. By the time he found out, it’d progressed to stage four—five being death, just so you get the drift. His long-term prognosis stinks; twenty percent survival rate if the treatment works, which it might not. He did six rounds of chemo and a passel of experimental drugs. Guy’s been sick as a dog.”
“It sounds awful.”
“It is. He was pulling out of it some and then recently he started feeling punk. They put him back in the hospital a couple of days ago. Blood tests showed severe anemia so they decided to transfuse him. Then they decided while he was in, they might as well run more tests so they can see where he stands. He’s a pessimist, of course, but to my way of thinking, there’s always hope.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not as sorry as I am. I’ve known him close to forty years, longer than I knew my wife.” Dolan took a drag of his cigarette,reaching for a tin ashtray on the table next to us. He tapped off a fraction of an inch of ash.
“How’d the two of you hook up? I thought he worked north county. You were PD down here.”
“He was already with the SO when our paths first crossed. This was 1948. I was from a blue-collar background, nothing educated or intellectual. I’d come out of the army with an attitude. Cocky and brash. Two years I knocked around, not doing anything much. I finally got a job as a pump jockey at a gas station in Lompoc. Talk about a dead end.
“One night a guy came in and pulled a gun on the night manager. I was in the backroom cleaning up at the end of my shift when I figured out what was going on. I grabbed a wrench, ducked out the side door, and came around the front. Guy was so busy watching to make sure my boss didn’t call the cops, he never saw me coming. I popped him a good one and knocked him on his ass. Stacey was the deputy who arrested him.
“He’s only ten years older than me, but he’s the closest thing to a mentor I ever had. He’s the one talked me into law enforcement. I went to college on the G.I. Bill and then hired on with the PD as soon as a job opened up. He even introduced me to Grace, and I married her six months later.”
“Sounds like he changed the course of your life.”
“In more ways than one.”
“Does he have family in the area?”
“No close relatives. The guy never married. A while back, he was dating someone—if that’s what you want to call it at our advanced age. Nice gal, but somehow it didn’t work out. Since Grace died, the two of us have spent a fair amount of time together. We go hunting and fishing any chance we get. Now that I’m out on medical, we’ve done a lot of that of late.”
“How’s he dealing with all of this?”
“Up and down. Too much time on his hands and not a lot to do except brood. I can’t tell you how many times I heard that one: guy retires after thirty years and the next thing you know he gets sick and dies. Stacey doesn’t say much about it, but I know how his mind works. He’s depressed as hell.”
“Is he religious?”
“Not him. He claims he’s an atheist, but we’ll see about that. Me, I always went to church, at least while Gracie was alive. I don’t see how you face death without believing in something.
Otherwise, it makes no sense.”
Dolan glanced up just as Tannie appeared with two large plates loaded with freshly made sandwiches and fries, plus two orders for the other table. Dolan interrupted his story to have a chat with her. I occupied myself with banging on the ketchup bottle until a thick drool of red covered the southeast corner of my fries. I knew he was leading up to something, but he was taking his sweet time. I lifted the top of the kaiser roll and salted everything in sight. Biting in, I could feel the egg yolk oozing into the bun. The combination of spicy salami and snappy pepper-hot jack cheese turned out to be the food equivalent of someone hollering Hot Damn! on the surface of my tongue. I made one of my food moans. Embarrassed, I looked up at them, but neither seemed to notice.
When Tannie finally left, Dolan stubbed out his cigarette and paused for an extended bout of coughing so fierce it made his whole body shake. I pictured his lungs like a set of black cartoon bellows, wheezing away.
He shook his head. “Sorry about that. I had a bad cold a month ago and it’s been hard to shake.” He took a swallow of whiskey to soothe his irritated throat. He picked up his sandwich and continued his story between bites, taking up exactly where he’d left off. “While Stacey’s been laid up, I’ve been doing what I can to get his apartment cleaned. Place is a mess. He should be out of the hospital tomorrow and I didn’t want him coming home to the sight of all that crap.”
He set his sandwich down to light another cigarette, rolling it over to the corner of his mouth while he pulled out a cylinder of papers he’d tucked into his breast coat pocket. “Yesterday, I went through a pile of papers on his kitchen table. I was hoping to come across the name of a friend I could contact— somebody to cheer him up. Stace could use a little something to look forward to. Anyway, there was nothing of that nature, but I did find this.”
He placed the curling sheaf on the table in front of me. I finished my sandwich in one last bite and wiped my hands on a napkin before I reached for the papers. I knew at a glance it was a copy of a Sheriff’s Department file. The cover page was marked 187 PC, indicating it was a homicide, with a case number following. The pages were held together with fasteners, sixty-five or seventy sheets in all, with a set of handwritten notes inserted at the back. I returned to the cover page.
Victim: Jane Doe
Found: Sunday, August 3, 1969
Location: Grayson Quarry, Highway 1, Lompoc
Under “Investigating Officers,” there were four names listed, one of them Stacey Oliphant’s.
Dolan leaned forward. “You can see he was one of the original investigating officers. Stace and me were the ones who found the body. We’d taken a Jeep up there and parked off the side of the road to go deer hunting that day. I guess there’s a gate across the road now, but the property was open back then. The minute we got out, we picked up the smell. We both knew what it was—something dead for days. Didn’t take us long to find out exactly what it was. She’d been flung down a short embankment like a sack of trash. This is the case he was working when he got sick. It’s always bugged him they never figured out who she was, let alone who killed her.”
I felt a dim stirring of memory. “I remember this. Wasn’t she stabbed and then dumped?”
“Right.”
“Seems odd they never managed to identify her.”
“He thought so, too. It’s one of those cases really stuck in his craw. He kept thinking there was something he’d overlooked. He’d go back to it when he could, but he never made much progress.”
“And you’re thinking what, to have another go at it?”
“If I can talk him into it. I think it’d make a world of difference in his attitude.”
I leafed through the photocopies, watching the progression of dates and events. “Looks like just about everything.”
“Including black-and-white prints of the crime scene photographs. He had another couple of files but this is the one caught my eye.” He paused to wipe his mouth and then pushed his plate aside. “It’d give him a lift to get back into this and see about developing some information. He can act as lead detective while we do the legwork.”
I found myself staring. “You and me.”
“Sure, why not? We can pay for your time. For now, all I’m suggesting is the three of us sit down and talk. If he likes the idea, we’ll go ahead. If not, I guess I’ll come up with something else.”
I tapped the file. “Not to state the obvious, but this is eighteen years old.”
“I know, but aside from Stacey’s interest, there hasn’t been a push on this since 1970 or so. What if we could crack it? Think what that’d do for him. It could make all the difference.” It was the first time I’d seen any animation in his face.
I pretended to ponder but there wasn’t much debate. I was sick of doing paperwork. Enough already with the file searches and the background checks. “Stacey still has access to the department?”
“Sure. A lot of folks out there think the world of him. We can probably get anything we need—within reason, of course.”
“Let me take this home and read it.”
Dolan sat back, trying not to look too pleased. “I’ll be over at CC’s from six until midnight. Show up by eight and we can swing over to St. Terry’s and bring Stacey up to speed.”
I found myself smiling in response.
2
I spent the early part of the afternoon in my new office digs, hammering away on my portable Smith-Corona. I typed up two overdue reports, did my filing, prepared invoices, and cleaned off my desk. I started in on the bills at 3:00 and by 3:35 I was writing out the final check, which I tore from my checkbook. I tucked it in the return envelope, then licked the flap so carelessly I nearly paper-cut my tongue. That done, I went into the outer office and moved all the unpacked boxes back into the closet. Nothing like a little motivation to get the lead out of your butt.
My supper that night consisted of a peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwich, accompanied by Diet Pepsi over ice. I ate in my minuscule living room, curled up on the sofa tucked into the window bay. In lieu of dinnerware, I used a fold of paper toweling that doubled as a dainty lip wipe when I’d finished my meal. With spring on the move, it was not quite dark out. The air was still chilly, especially once the sun went down. Through the partially opened window, I could hear a distant lawn mower and the occasional fragment of conversation as assorted people walked by. I live a block from the beach on a side street that provides overflow parking when Cabana Boulevard gets jammed.
I slid down comfortably on my spine, my sock feet on the coffee table, while I settled in to work. I went through the file quickly at first, just to get the lay of the land. A detective named Brad Crouse was lead investigator on the case. The other investigating officers, aside from Stacey Oliphant, were Detective Keith Baldwin, Sergeant Oscar Wallen, Sergeant Melvin Galloway, and Deputy Joe Mandel. A lot of manpower. Crouse had typed the bulk of the reports, using multiple carbons, which Stacey had apparently then photocopied from the old murder book. Judging from the number of strikeovers, I had to guess Detective Crouse had not been first in his class in secretarial school. I fancied if I put my ear to the page, I’d pick up the churlish echoes of his long-ago curses embedded in the lines of print.
It’s odd going through an old file, like reading a mystery novel where you spoil the ending for yourself by peeking ahead to the very last page. The final document, a letter from a soils expert in San Pedro, California, was dated September 28, 1971, and indicated that the sample submitted by the Santa Teresa County Sheriff’s Department would be impossible to distinguish from samples taken from similar deposits across the state. Sincerely. So sorry. End of the line for you, bub. I went back to the beginning and started reading again, this time taking notes.
According to the first officer at the scene, the girl’s body had been rolled over the edge of an embankment, coming to rest about fifteen feet down, some fifty feet from the highway. Con Dolan and Stacey Oliphant had spotted her at approximatel
y 5:00 P.M. on that Sunday—1700 hours if you’re talking military time, as this report did. She was lying on her left side on a crumpled canvas tarp, her hands bound in front of her with a length of white plastic-coated wire. She was wearing a dark blue Dacron blouse, white cotton pants with a print of dark blue daisies with a dot of red in each center. There was a leather sandal on her right foot; the matching sandal was found in the brush a short distance away. Marks in the dirt suggested she’d been dragged across the grass near the road.
Even from the top of the slope, Dolan and Oliphant could see numerous stab wounds in her chest. It was also apparent her throat had been slashed.
Oliphant had made immediate CB contact with the Lompoc PD. Because the location was in the county, two on-duty sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to the scene. Deputy Joe Mandel and Sergeant Melvin Galloway arrived twenty minutes after the initial call. Photographs were taken of the decedent and of the surrounding area. The body was then removed to a Lompoc mortuary, pending arrival of the coroner. Meanwhile, the deputies searched the vicinity, took soil samples, bagged the tarpaulin along with a nearby broken shrub and two pieces of shrub stem that appeared to be stained with blood.
On Tuesday, August 5, 1969, Mandel and Galloway returned to the crime scene to take measurements—the distance from the highway to the spot where the body had been found, the width of the blacktop, the location of the stray sandal. Sergeant Galloway took additional photos of the various areas, showing the embankment, damaged shrubs, and drag marks. There were no crime scene sketches, but perhaps they’d become separated from the rest of the file in the intervening years.
I took a minute to sort through the photographs, which were few in number and remarkably uninformative: eight black-and-white prints, including one of the roadway, one of an officer pointing at a broken shrub, one of the embankment where the body was found, and four of the body from a distance of fifteen feet. There were no close-ups of Jane Doe’s face, no views of her wounds or the knotted wire with which her hands had been bound. The tarp was visible beneath her, but it was difficult to judge how much of the body, if any, had been covered. Times have changed. Current practice would have dictated fifty such photographs along with a video and a detailed crime-scene sketch. In the same envelope, I found an additional five photographs in faded color showing the girl’s sandals, pants, shirt, bra, and panties laid out on what looked like a sheet of white paper.