Jonathan Kellerman_Petra Connor 02 (20 page)

CHAPTER

31

T
he five of them piled into Mac's Caddy and drove around the corner, to a residential side street. Nice, well-kept houses, a hint of daylight turned everything lilac-gray, almost pretty.

Petra imagined some citizen spotting the old car, phoning it in, Hollywood D's having to explain to a nervous Valley uniform.

Lyle Leon sat sandwiched in back, between her and Luc. Good cologne—clean, laced with cinnamon. Trying to smile but his mouth wasn't buying it.

Definitely scared.

Motivation. She liked that. “Tell us your story, Mr. Leon.”

“Marcella was my niece. Sandra's my third cousin. I was supposed to take care of both of them but it got out of control.”

“Where are their parents?” said Petra.

“Marcella's father died years ago and her mother left.”

“Left the Players?”

Lyle said, “Can we keep them out of it?”

“That depends on how the story goes.”

“It doesn't go
there,
” said Leon. “We're thieves but we don't hurt anyone.”

Petra said, “Why'd Marcella's mother leave?”

“She said she needed space, ended up hooking in Vegas. Marcella was the youngest of four kids. One of my cousins took them all in. Later, it got to be too much and I got Marcella.”

“What Sandra's story?”

“Sandra's father's in jail in Utah for another couple of years and her mother's got mental problems. What's the difference? I was put in charge of them and it got out of control. The problem was Venice. We went there last summer, then again this year. The deal was we'd be working Ocean Front walk a couple of hours a day, have the rest of the day to enjoy the beach. The girls loved it.”

“Working how?”

“Selling merchandise. Sunglasses, hats, tourist stuff.”

From the front, Mac said, “You sell tourist junk while they pick pockets?”

Petra felt Leon tense up against her shoulder. Mac was a vet but he was approaching this wrong. Challenging the guy. Leon was a con, maybe worse, but let him talk.

She said, “So you moved to Venice last summer?”

Leon stayed tight. “Picking pockets is crude, sir. We practiced a time-honored American tradition. Buy low, sell high.”

He'd been busted for selling useless house products to old people. Petra pictured fake gold chains that disintegrated into dust, sunglasses that melted in the summer heat.

She said, “The girls loved Venice but it turned out to be a problem.”

“Marcella met a person.” A beat later: “She got pregnant.”

“And had an abortion,” said Petra.

“You know about that.”

“The autopsy showed it.”

“I didn't know an autopsy could do that . . . okay, so you know I'm telling the truth.”

“About Marcella getting pregnant? Sure.”

“The abortion,” said Leon, “was what started the problem. Supposedly. That's not what he said the first time around. Just the opposite, he was furious she hadn't taken precautions. I had to pay him off, he seemed fine with that. Then he showed up this summer, wanting to know where the baby is. I told him there was no baby and he went nuts.”

“Who are we talking about?”

“Omar Selden. A seriously bad person. Gangbanger, though you wouldn't know to look at him. Half white, half Mexican, something like that. You'll have him in your records, he did some time for robbery. But never for what he really did.”

“Which was?”

“Killing people,” said Leon. “Lots of them, according to what he told Marcella. Even if half true, he's a monster.”

“He bragged about killing to Marcella?”

“It impressed her,” said Leon. “Stupid girl.”

“Who'd this Selden kill?”

“He claimed to be the head hit man for his gang—VVO. Said he'd also done freelance work in prison. A hundred bucks and he'd hit someone. I told Marcella it was bullshit 'cause that's what I thought at the time. I was wrong.”

VVO was Venice Vatos Oakwood. Tight band of low-grade psychopaths, supposedly inactive until last year when they'd resumed shooting people in broad daylight.

Petra remembered one case Milo Sturgis had worked. Family man, clerk at a Good Guys store, mistaken for a VVO dropout and hit while strolling his two-year-old near Ocean Park. The baby spattered with blood, wide-eyed, mute. The shooter, a fourteen-year-old turned out to be learning disabled. Nearsighted, never taken in for a damn eye checkup.

Lyle Leon said, “Once I paid him off, I thought we were free of him. The whole year I never heard from him again so I figured it was okay to return to Venice—the girls had really enjoyed the summer. Then stupid Marcella spots Selden on the walkway. I turn my head for a second and she's winking at him. And he's winking back, soon they're off on the sand, talking. Couple of days later—couple of nights later—he drops by.”

Leon shook his head. “You saw Marcella. Fat, dumpy, those stupid shoes she insisted on wearing. Sandra's a hard-body, put her in a thong bikini, some Rollerblades, she'd turn heads. So who does Selden develop a thing for? Marcella. And Marcella falls for it.”

Teenagers, thought Petra. Even scam artists couldn't control them.

Then she flashed on Leon's leering description of Sandra and wondered where his head was at. Hepatitis A. Unhealthy sexual practices.

Tension filled the car. Mac and the others wondered, too.

“Sandra's a hard-body,” she said.

“Hey,” said Leon. “I'm being objective. Sandra could attract attention if she wanted to.”

If
he
wanted her to. Using the girl as a distraction while he and Marcella pulled the scam of the moment. But Marcella had picked up an unwelcome admirer.

She said, “Sandra has hepatitis.”

Leon was silent.

“You knew, Mr. Leon. You showed up with her at the clinic. Did you ever get her any serious medical help?”

“It's self-limiting. That's medical talk for it goes away by itself.”

“You're a doctor, too,” said Petra.

“Listen,” said Leon, “I took good care of those girls. For ten years, on and off, they lived with me and ate well and learned to read and I never touched them. Not once.”

Petra recalled the cramped quarters of the Brooks Avenue shack. A grown man and two hormone-suffused girls.

And the blue ribbon for fatherhood goes to . . .

She said, “So Omar Selden and Marcella reignited their affair.”

“It wasn't an affair,” said Leon. “The first summer she snuck away to be with him and he fucked her silly. Idiot doesn't use a condom and he's amazed when she gets knocked up. For all I know, he shared her with his friends, wasn't even the father. One thing he made painfully clear: He wasn't going to
be
a father. He threatened me until I paid him off and promised to finance the abortion. Thousand bucks, out of my pocket. A year later, Marcella winks at him and he's back. The week before the murder, I'm alone in the house 'cause I let the girls go to a concert, some new band at the Troubador. I dropped them off at ten, was supposed to pick them up at two
A.M
. By eleven I'm back in Venice, mellowing out. At eleven-thirty, the door explodes and Selden is standing over me. He kicked it in, is standing over me, saying where's my son? Idiot assumed it was a son, all that macho bullshit. I told him there was no baby, I'd done exactly what he wanted. He says ‘No way, man, I never said that.' I try to reason with him.”

Leon sucked in his breath. His cheek twitched.

“First I think he's listening, then suddenly, he
swells
up—I swear you could see him
inflate,
like he's hooked up to a bicycle pump. All red in the face, veins bulging, screaming that I'm a murderer.”

A longer tremor, snakelike, coursed from Leon's brow down to his chin. His lips trembled.

“That's when I realize he's nuts. Last summer he was freaking out because she was pregnant, couldn't wait for her to get rid of it. Now he's screaming for his kid. I try to calm him down, he grabs my hair, yanks my head back, suddenly he's got a gun out and he's jamming it against my throat,
grinding.
It hurt like hell. He starts talking in this insane whisper about how he's going to blow my tongue out for lying. Finally, I manage to talk him down.”

“What deal did you make with him?” said Petra.

Leon didn't answer.

“I'm sure you're a persuasive fellow, Lyle, but charm alone wouldn't talk a guy like Selden down.”

Leon stared straight ahead.

Mac said, “You did something you're ashamed of. We can all live with that if this sad story leads somewhere.”

Leon tightened up again.

“The deal was,” he said, “that I'd let him have another go at Marcella. So he could knock her up again. Have his fucking baby.”

No one spoke. The Caddy felt hot and close. Leon's cinnamon cologne had turned sour, polluted by fear-sweat.

He said, “I never intended to follow through. We made an appointment, for the following night, and the idiot left looking happy. The moment I was sure he was really gone, I packed all our stuff out of there, picked up the girls at the Troubador, and left.”

“Where'd you go?” said Petra.

“Another place.”

“Where?”

“We have places,” said Leon.

“What kind of places?”

“Houses, apartments, short-term rentals.”

“Give us an address, Mr. Leon, or face a Hindering an Investigation charge.”

Leon twisted to face her. “I call
you
and I'm hindering?”

“You call us and tell us a self-aggrandizing story.”

“I tell you how I screwed up and it's self-aggrandizing?”

“Stop echoing.”

Leon said, “That's what shrinks do and it works.”

Petra got in his face. “You're not a shrink! Give us an address
now
!”

“Okay, okay . . . I took them to a place in Hollywood.” He recited an address on North McCadden. “If you go there, it'll be vacant. I'm scared as hell, living out of my car.”

The sympathy ploy. She said, “Then I guess you shouldn't drive too far.”

“Listen to me—” He touched her wrist. She glared and he pulled back. “Selden won't let go of this. You saw what he did to Marcella. To those other kids. On top of that, I don't know where Sandy is. The day after Marcella was killed, she disappeared. All she had to do was stay put in the apartment for one day, but when I got back she was gone.”

“Back from where?”

“I had business to take care of.”

“What kind of business?”

“Getting some cash together, what's the difference? The plan was for Sandy to wait and then we'd leave L.A. Instead, she split on her own.” Leon's eyes shut. “I'm thinking, somehow she got spotted by Selden or one of his homeboys.”

“Selden's everywhere?”

“He's like a mad dog on scent. The thing that scares me is I don't know how much Marcella told him. About where we stay, what we do.”

“Maybe Sandra figured it was smarter not to stick around with you.”

“No,” said Leon. “No way. She didn't take anything with her. Not her clothes or her frog—she's got a stuffed frog she sleeps with every night. I got it for her when she was little, told her it came from her mother. No way would she leave without it.”

“She have any money?”

“I always let her keep some in her purse. But not much. A hundred bucks, a hundred fifty.”

Enough for a bus ticket.

Leon said, “I'm scared she left for a short while, got abducted.”

“Left for what?”

Leon hesitated. “Sandra had gotten into stuff.”

“Drug stuff?”

He nodded. Downcast, every bit the failed parent. Then Petra remembered: The Players saw themselves as performers.

“Which drugs?”

“Weed, pills.”

Petra said, “So you're figuring she went somewhere to score dope, got spotted by Selden.”

“Had to be. For all I know her source was someone who knew Selden and tipped him off.”

“You're making him sound like the Godfather.”

“It had to go down that way,” Leon insisted. “There's no other explanation.”

“Unless you killed Marcella. Sandra, too.”

The accusation didn't ruffle Leon. “Why,” he said quietly, “would I do that?”

“Maybe there's more to your relationship with the girls than you've told us.”

“Ask anyone,” he said. “Anyone who knows.”

“Should I ask Robert Leon?”

“You can try.”

“Meaning he won't talk to me.”

“Robert will talk, but he won't tell you anything.”

“You visited him six weeks ago,” said Petra. “Was that to give him a report on the state of the business? How well you were taking care of the girls?”

“We're family. I visit.”

“What does Robert think about Marcella's murder?”

“He's not happy,” said Leon. “No one is.”

“That put you in additional danger?”

Leon shook his head. “Not physically. I told you, we're not violent.”

“Not physically, but . . .”

Leon gazed at the Caddy's dome light. “Financially. I'm screwed. I'm going to have to leave.”

“The Players.”

“I messed up too severely to be allowed to stay. That's why I'm living out of my car. I can't stay in any of their properties anymore. Which is fine, it's time for a change. I don't even want to be in California. Too crowded.”

Mac said, “You're very much going to be in California. Right here in L.A., friend. Material witness.”

Leon nodded, dropped his head. “I knew this might happen but I had to come forward.”