Night Moves Page 5

  Knowing Milo and decoding his tone: Serious Business.

  As I’d gotten dressed, I’d said, “Sorry, honey.”

  Robin laughed off the formality, kissed me, looped her arm in mine, and walked me to the door.

  I wondered if she was still up. If she was, how much I’d tell her.

  Milo said, “How’s your schedule tomorrow?”

  “Phone conference with some lawyers in the morning, afternoon’s clear.”

  “If I get answers by then, I’ll let you know. If I don’t, I’ll probably call you. Especially if I get to him.” Indicating Trevor Bitt’s Tudor. “From what everyone says, mental health backup’s a good idea. Maybe he is the bad guy and this’ll close nice and tight. On the other hand, when has optimism been a valid concept?”

  The moment I’d arrived at Evada Lane, I’d switched to work mode: hyperfocused, aiming for logic, suppressing emotion. As I drove home, the vile reality of what I’d just seen hit me.

  This was more than murder. It was erasure. An outrage had begun with dispatch, shifted to butchery, ended up with clinical choreography on that blandest of stages, a suburban house.

  L.A.’s vastness and varied geography offered a universe of dump sites. Why Evada Lane? Why the Corvins?

  Maybe by tomorrow morning the truth would boil down to the odd duck on the block, a sadistic psychopath closeted in his own upscale lair.

  A vicious hermit who spied? Had Trevor Bitt, parting his curtains a smidge, watched the family drive away for their Sunday dinner and embarked on a personal Grand Guignol?

  That said nothing about motive but it did solve a whole lot of logistical problems.

  A brief walk separated Bitt’s property from the Corvins’. Once he’d made it to the end of their driveway with a plastic-bagged package, flipping the gate latch would’ve provided privacy, courtesy of three walls of impermeable hedge.

  After that, trip the flimsy lock and defile thy neighbor.

  Why the Corvins?

  Maybe because there’s nothing like years of proximity to breed resentment.

  Rosy idealists like to think throwing people together breeds tolerance and goodwill, but often it accomplishes just the opposite. The Corvins hadn’t cited any conflict with Bitt, just curt rebuffs. But who knew how he felt?

  Hostility grew deep roots in a certain type of psyche. Sometimes it didn’t take much to trigger action.

  The TV next door playing too loudly.

  The kids fighting noisily.

  Or, if I was right about Chet being the target, it could simply boil down to too many obnoxious comments by a blowhard with the capacity to irritate a saint.

  Chet ridicules, Bitt says nothing. Chet keeps going, Bitt stews. Imagines. Plots.

  One of the quiet ones.

  His landscaping, all that stay-away flora. What if he kept the world at bay because he had a lot to hide? Unhealthy appetites, a grotesquely violent fantasy life that had spilled over to murder?

  On the other hand, Trevor Bitt might be an artist who craved isolation in order to ply his talents. Or just a guy who enjoyed his privacy.

  I’d research him tomorrow. After I figured out what to tell Robin. Meanwhile, drive and try not to think about the horror in Chet Corvin’s den.

  I put the radio on, already tuned to KJazz. Lucked out and got the first few bars of Stan Getz playing “Samba Triste,” one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever recorded.

  That helped but only until the song ended. Then came a bunch of public-service announcements and I started to feel human again.

  In the early-morning hours, crossing from the Palisades into Brentwood, not a pleasant sensation.

  Robin had activated the alarm. I switched off, rearmed, took off my shoes, and padded to the bedroom.

  She was curled up under the covers. I went into the kitchen, thought about a body without face or hands, and filled a glass with tap water.

  A high-pitched peep issued from the utility room.

  Blanche, our little blond French bulldog, greeting me from her crate.

  We leave the door ajar but she never pushes it open. Well trained, we congratulate ourselves. But I’ve always suspected she likes the privilege of us tending to her in the morning, extending a formal invitation to greet the day.

  She looked comfortable enough, now, a rotund sausage of honey-colored fur topped by an oversized, knobby head. One eye shut, the other cocked open. I reached in and petted her. She purred, let loose several glorious farts, did that smiling thing of hers, yawned, curled her tongue, and extended a paw. When I took it, she licked my hand and studied me with a single, soft brown eye.

  “Need something, cutie?”

  She cyclops-stared at me. You’re the one with needs, buster.

  I rubbed behind her ears. She stretched and fell back asleep.

  Standing at the sink and drinking water, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d been comforted.

  * * *

  —

  When I slipped into bed, Robin drew the covers over her head and rubbed my foot with her size sixes.

  Two hours later, she was still asleep and I was wide awake. At some point I must’ve slipped under, because I woke at eight, feeling as if I’d been tossed in a clothes dryer.

  No one on the other side of the bed. The shower was running. Stripping naked, I stepped into the bathroom. Blanche lay on a mat, chewing a jerky stick. The shower stall was coated with fog, reducing Robin to shifting flits of bronze skin. She was singing, not loud enough for me to make out the words or the tune.

  I drew a smiley face in the fog. She opened the door, drew me in. Soaping me up, she resumed her tune. “Whistle While You Work.”

  * * *

  —

  Garbed and clean, we sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee and eating toast while Blanche continued to erode her jerky.

  Despite the shower, I’d decided to run and was dressed for it. Robin, ready to finish up an archtop guitar for a jazz great, wore her shop uniform: black tee, blue overalls, red Keds. Snips of auburn curls restrained by a bandanna had come loose, endowing her with a halo.

  “When did you get in, hon?”

  “Around one thirty.”

  “Didn’t hear a thing.” She nibbled crust, raised her mug with one hand, let the other land softly on the back of my neck.

  I said, “You were out solid.”

  She tickled the spot where hair met nape. “Complicated case?”

  “Complicated and nasty.”

  “Ah.”

  “How much do you want to know?”

  “As much as you want to tell me.”

  Sounding like she meant it. Once upon a time how much I disclosed had been an issue. My protectiveness, her need to be taken seriously.

  All that resolved, now. As far as I could see.

  I decided to keep it sketchy. Ended up telling her everything.

  * * *

  —

  She said, “Poor man. How do you go about identifying a victim like that?”

  “Check the missing persons files, something unusual in the autopsy could help. If none of that works out, maybe the media. But even without an I.D., there’s already a person of interest. Your basic hostile loner living next door.”

  “Scary guy?”

  “All we’ve heard so far is surliness. He works at home, rarely emerges, doesn’t answer when spoken to.”

  “Works at what?”

  “Comic-book artist.”

  She fiddled with her toast. “What’s his name?”

  “Trevor Bitt.”

  “ ‘Mr. Backwards.’ ”

  “You know him?”

  “I know his work,” she said. “My misspent youth. San Luis was even more conservative back then. Retired military, people working at the prison, small ranchers, blue-collar guys like my dad.”

  I said, “You had a counterculture phase I never knew about?”

  She grinned. “More like I tried to please everyone. I got decent grades,
didn’t talk back to my parents, spent hours in Dad’s shop learning to work with wood, zipped my lip to avoid blowups with Mom. At the same time, I was part of an outsider group in school. We called ourselves the Creative Cult—no snickers, please.”

  “God forbid.”

  “God and me, darling. We were an artsy bunch of twits, did our share of weed, a few of the more daring souls got into heavier stuff—some of them ended up in the prison.”

  “Rebels with a minor cause.”

  “That’s giving too much credit. We were pretentious nerds pretending to buck authority. So when it came to music and art, the deeper underground, the better, and a big part of that was alternative comix. Crumb, the Hernandez brothers, Peter Bagge, and Trevor Bitt. He used to self-publish these pulpy little books that the first head shop in town carried. Mr. Backwards was his main character. Big body, small head, lecherously popping eyes, hairy hands shaped like this.”

  She formed claws.

  “Good-looking guy,” I said.

  “Real Adonis. The main gag was that his head faced the opposite direction from his body, like someone had stitched him together the wrong way. As a result, he was always bumping into things.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Bumping into people. Specifically their genitals.”

  I said, “Convenient disability.”

  “ ‘Oops, apologies, ma-damme. Well, hmm, er, I say, ma-damme, as long as we’ve ahem united our tantric forces, why don’t we consummate…’ ”

  I laughed.

  “Funny stuff,” she said. “Except when Mr. B happened to bump into his daughter. Or his mother. Or his grandmother.”

  “Oh.”

  “Über-creepy, Alex, and Bitt being so skillful as an artist heightened whatever reaction he was after, be it laughter or nausea. The boys in the group thought it was hilarious and rolled around like insane monkeys. The girls thought it was sick and tried to get the boys to stop reading Bitt. It caused a split, one reason we fell apart. But mostly, we disbanded because of short attention spans.”

  She put down her toast. “Bitt lives in the Palisades, now? Who’da thunk.”

  “In a two-story Tudor.”

  “Next you’re going to tell me he drives a minivan.”

  “Pickup truck.” I described the house and the landscaping.

  She said, “That does sound pretty hostile.”

  “Did his cartoons get violent as well as sexual?”

  “They were always about violence. Mr. Backwards liked to explode things, bumping into detonators, nuclear switches, switches for power saws. Bitt constructed these meticulously detailed Rube Goldberg–type scenes. Oversized rats escaping from feral cats knocking over lamps that fell into vats of oil and set off huge fires. Exploding bodies, mushroom clouds—lots of mushroom clouds. The stories usually ended up with massive pools of blood, heaps of organs, detached limbs—”

  She put down the toast. “Oh, my. Wouldn’t that be something. All the time we thought Bitt was satirizing and he was sick?”

  * * *

  —

  I’d just showered a second time and stepped into my office when Milo called.

  “Get any sleep?”

  “Plenty. How’d the canvass go?”

  He said, “It didn’t. No one knows anything about anything. Like Felice said, this is not a neighborhood where they throw block parties. Only four houses have CC systems and one’s bogus, dummy cameras mounted as ‘deterrents.’ The other three are operative and the citizens were happy to let us view the feeds but two had cameras trained tight on front doors and no view of the street. Which is kind of counterproductive but I got a clear sense no one expected bad stuff to happen on Evada.”

  “How’d they take to the news?”

  “Appropriately worried. Not that it led to any decent information, everyone just wants promises we’ll up patrol. The one camera with a long view was an antique and poorly maintained, the images are black and white and grainy, all you can make out is a blur when something passes by. During the time the Corvins were gone, nothing that looks like a person appears but three vehicles do show up. The first travels away from the Corvins’ house at six sixteen, so that’s the family leaving. Another circles the cul-de-sac and leaves without stopping, got to be someone who was lost and entered the dead end. The interesting one arrives fifteen minutes after the Corvins depart and you don’t see anything else until a blur in the opposite direction appears sixty-eight minutes later. So the timing’s right but I’ve got no clue about make or model, can’t even prove it’s the same wheels coming and going, for all I know one person parked out of view and another left later. I was hoping for enhancement but our video techie says no dice, all he can do is estimate size. Larger than a compact, smaller than a big SUV. So much for technology.”

  “Did you get to Bitt?”

  “Not yet. His truck’s still there but he didn’t answer my ring. I didn’t question his neighbors about him specifically because I’ve got nothing on him and the last thing I need is the peasants converging with torches and pitchforks. I did inquire about neighbor disputes in general and got the usual petty stuff: dog poop in flower beds, garbage cans left out too long. But no festering feuds. I extended the canvass to adjacent streets, Sean’s still working but so far nada.”

  I said, “I learned a few things about Bitt.” I summed up Robin’s description of the books.

  “Blood and guts and incest,” he said. “Okay, I definitely wanna meet this prince. Wouldn’t mind having you here when I give him a second try.”

  “I should be free by one.”

  “Then one it’ll be.”

  My phone conference ended early; a couple of lawyers working a contentious custody case finally serious about “emotional resolution for the sake of the children.”

  I called the judge and told her.

  She said, “They can say that but the real reason’s both clients are running out of money.”

  “Whatever works.”

  “What works for me is getting idiots off my docket.”

  I hung up and called Milo. “I can come now.”

  He said, “A sliver of hope on a highly flawed day.”

  * * *

  —

  Daylight was kind to Evada Lane, flowers and grass jewel-toned, tree shadows prettily dappled. Despite the yellow tape, the Corvin house looked jarringly benign. No more cops guarding the property, just Milo, sitting in his unmarked.

  He got out and we walked to Trevor Bitt’s house. This garden gate was seven feet of black-painted metal.

  Milo said, “Exactly.”

  We climbed three steps to an oak door that looked hand-hewn. Instead of a peephole, a small sliding door caged by a grid of wrought iron.

  Milo rang the bell. Knocked. Rang a dozen more times. Knocked harder.

  Just as we’d turned to leave, the little door slid open and a brown eye surrounded by pale skin filled the rectangle of space.

  “Mr. Bitt?”

  No answer.

  Milo flashed his badge.

  The eye stared, unblinking.

  “Could you please open the door, sir. We’d like a few words.”

  Nothing.

  “Sir—”

  A deep voice said, “Words about what?”

  “There’s been a situation—a crime was committed at one of your neighbors’.”

  No response.

  Milo said, “A serious crime, Mr. Bitt. We’re talking to everyone on the block.”

  Silence.

  “Mr. Bitt—”

  “Not interested.”

  “It would be easier, sir, if you opened the door.”

  “For you.”

  “Sir, there’s no reason for you to obstruct us.”

  “This isn’t obstruction. It’s privacy.” The tiny door slid shut.

  Milo rang the bell another dozen times. His face was flushed. “No curiosity about what kind of crime, which neighbor. Maybe because he already knows.”

  We returned to t
he sidewalk. He pulled out his phone. “This is gonna be a total waste of time, but.”

  He got Deputy D.A. John Nguyen on the other end, described the situation, asked if there could be grounds for a warrant. I couldn’t hear Nguyen’s brief reply but Milo’s expression said it all.

  He turned and stared at Bitt’s Tudor. Daylight wasn’t kind to the spiky plants. More menacing in full color.

  Milo said, “Guy’s an idiot, all this is gonna do is make me dig deeper on him.” He strode back to his car and got behind the wheel. Upgraded sedan, equipped with a nifty new touchscreen that he began working.

  But just as with the CCTV, technology can only carry you so far. Nothing on Trevor Bitt in the LAPD database, NCIC, the state sex offender file, or a national database operated privately.

  Sitting in the passenger seat, I’d pulled up an image gallery of Bitt’s cartoons.

  Dope, nudity, gore, taboos abandoned with a ferocity that sometimes seemed forced.

  Mr. Backwards was a hirsute grotesque pinhead, favoring floral shirts, beads, sandals, and baggy bell-bottoms whose roominess failed to conceal frequent erections of unlikely dimensions.

  When he collided with people, one eye winked and popped and drool dribbled from his slack mouth, a secretion often followed by copious productions of other body fluids.

  All in all, a creepy mixture of slapstick and threat. Like the uncle you hope doesn’t show up at reunions.

  Photos of Trevor Bitt showed him as anything but unconventional.

  Tall, thin, and narrow-shouldered, the cartoonist wore his hair neatly trimmed and left-parted. The most recent shot was a decade old, Bitt looking like a white-haired executive as he signed books at Comic-Con International in San Diego. Sitting primly, reading glasses perched on his nose, surrounded by fans, some of whom wore hand-sewn Mr. Backwards costumes complete with crude, leering masks. A huge blowup of the character’s slavering countenance hung on the wall.