Chapter 7
7
W arren called Tiffany Greene’s number. When she answered, he said, “I’m sorry to bother you again, but what have you learned so far? Has anybody seen her or talked to her?”
“Not for the past couple days. After I told her to go see you, she told a couple other friends she had an appointment she was going to, but nobody I’ve talked to seems to have heard from her how it went, or really, anything. I mean, we’re not teenage girls who are on the phone with one another all day long, so nobody thought much about it. I told everybody I talked to that we’re trying to get in touch with her.”
He said, “Has she been dating anybody lately? Anybody she might go on a trip with?”
“There’s nobody she liked very much, and I doubt that anybody like that turned up in the hours between your office visit and eight o’clock or so, when I called her.”
“What about her family? Where do they live?”
“She’s from somewhere in the east. She went to Bryn Mawr. That’s in Pennsylvania, but I think she was brought up in Ohio. Same difference, I guess. She was very close to her mother, at least growing up. She’s always quoting her, and she did say some sharp and funny things, but I don’t know if she’s even alive now. Vesper had a sister, too, but she died for sure. An especially bad form of breast cancer that swept her away in a few months.”
“Are you the kind of friends who have keys to each other’s houses?”
“We used to be years ago. She and George lived a couple blocks from Bill and me, so it made sense. If I locked myself out, I could just walk over there and get my key, or she would drive over with it. But after you got me the house in the divorce and I had the pleasure of kicking Bill out, I sold it and bought this place, which is miles away. When I moved, I gave her key back.”
“Is there anybody else who might have that kind of relationship with her?”
“Not that I know of,” she said. “And none of our old mutual friends lives that close to her now, so it would probably be somebody new.”
“Well, thanks,” he said. “Please don’t forget to let me know if you hear anything.”
“Sure,” she said. “You sound worried about her.”
“Just trying to save myself a lot of extra work later,” he said. “My motives are selfish, I assure you.”
After the call ended, he thought about what he’d learned and what he’d said. He judged that his tone had been sufficiently even and unemotional at the end to calm Tiffany down and prevent her from telling her friends something might have happened to Vesper Ellis. He continued to be surprised at how often his profession required him to lie.
He dialed the phone again, listened to the ring signal, then heard a voice say, “Major Crimes, Sergeant McHargue.”
He said, “Hello, Sergeant. This is Charles Warren again. Do you remember that when you asked me whether there was anything in my business that might be connected with the attack the other night, I mentioned I had a client who noticed money disappearing from investment accounts? I’ve been trying to reach her since that afternoon. She hasn’t answered any calls. I just got off a call with the close friend of hers who referred her to me. She’s called everybody they know in common, and nobody else has seen her or been able to reach her either.”
“Were they expecting to?”
“There wasn’t a specific event, but I’m told this isn’t normal for her. Normally she would have told that friend what had happened at her meeting with me, for instance. She didn’t. Others had been trying to reach her too. I wondered if you could have an officer drive by her house and do a welfare check. I could meet him there.”
“Do you have a reason to think somebody did something to her?”
“I think it’s a possibility. I’ve been finding more evidence that someone has been diverting funds from her accounts. The fact that someone came after me within three hours of our meeting makes me think somebody may have been watching her.”
“I’ll ask for a check. Can you give me her address?”
Warren read the address on his computer screen.
“Got it.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. I’d like to be there when the officer does the check. How soon do you think that will be?”
“I’d say you should start heading over there now.”
“Thank you again.”
In a moment he was walking across the outer office, putting on his sport coat. “I’m heading over to Vesper Ellis’s house to see if she’s there. I may not be back, so when you leave, make sure everything that can be locked or turned off is.”
The house was in Encino, a two-story white colonial-style building with black door and shutters, two chimneys, large oak trees, manicured lawn, and a rose garden. It looked as though it had been picked up and moved from Connecticut. There was a walkway made of cobblestones leading from the driveway to the front steps.
Warren had just parked at the curb when the police car arrived. The officer who got out and walked to the front door was a short woman with dark hair in a tight bun. She pushed the doorbell, and as Warren got out of his car, he could hear the chime sounding inside. He walked to the foot of the driveway and said, “Hi, officer. I’m Charles Warren, Mrs. Ellis’s attorney. I’m the one who asked for a welfare check. She doesn’t seem to be responding.”
“Not so far,” she said, “but I just got here.” She pushed the doorbell again.
“Do you mind if I hang around while you do the check?”
“Suit yourself,” she said.
She rang the doorbell again, they heard the chime and waited for about ten seconds, and then she knocked on the door loudly and they both listened, but there was no sound of footsteps. She knocked again, this time more loudly, with no response, and then she rang again. Next she stepped to the front window and looked in. “I can see the alarm panel, and the green light is on, so it isn’t armed.” She tried the doorknob, but it was locked.
Warren leaned so he could see into the window over her head, but he sensed that he had made her feel uncomfortable, so he stepped back about five feet, and half turned away.
The cop said nothing, but began to walk along the front of the house. When she came to the next window, she leaned close and peered inside, her hands framing her eyes, then moved on to the next one and did the same. Warren was relieved, because her moves made it seem natural to lag one window behind and maintain his distance. He noticed that before she moved each time she looked down to stare at the ground for footprints or other evidence of problems.
Every angle he had seen of the living room and foyer looked neat and orderly—nothing out of place, no shade variations between parts of floors that could indicate wetness or staining, no places on walls that looked as though anything had been wiped or smudged.
When the cop reached the back steps of the house she went up to the door, rang the back doorbell once, waited, and then rang it again, knocked once, knocked harder, tried to turn the doorknob, but failed. She looked in the glass on the upper part of the door, but Warren was pretty sure that she couldn’t see much, maybe a part of the kitchen floor and a view of the rest of the room veiled by the gauzy curtain. When she came down, she continued her circuit of the house, and appeared to be giving every inch of the property the same intense scrutiny. She walked to the upper end of the driveway and looked in the row of windows at the top of the garage door. “No car,” she said, returned to the place where she had left off, and continued the rest of the way around to the front of the house.
As she walked past him, Warren pretended to take a picture of the house’s front porch, but timed it to take her nameplate, because he expected she would leave now and he might need to know that later. The plate said, “N. Porter.”
She surprised him by continuing across the front lawn to the house to the right of Vesper Ellis’s. She rang the doorbell and took a step back. A moment later an elderly man came to the door. He was tall and slim, with a slightly bent spine. Officer Porter said, “Good afternoon, sir. I’m here doing a welfare check on your neighbor, Mrs. Ellis.”
“Vesper?” the man said. “Has something happened to her?”
“It’s just that some friends of hers haven’t been able to reach her. Do you know when you last saw her?”
“I saw her rolling one of her empty trash bins up the driveway. You know the noise that makes. Trash pickup is Tuesday on this block, so it had to be Tuesday. I glanced out the window because you do that even though you recognize the sound and know what it must be. Or it could have been Wednesday, because sometimes if you come home after a long day at work and having dinner out and don’t feel like doing it you put it off until the next morning.”
“Yes, sir. And have you heard or seen anything from her house since then? Like music, or voices or a door slamming?”
“No. She’s a quiet neighbor. She and her husband used to do a lot of entertaining, but that ended when he died.”
“Thank you,” she said, took a notebook out of her pocket, asked for his name, wrote it down, then crossed the street and rang that doorbell and repeated nearly the same conversation with the younger woman who answered that door. Next she went to the house to the left of Vesper Ellis’s house, but nobody answered that doorbell or the knocking. She looked at the Ellis house again, this time staying as far from the siding as possible, and craned her neck to stare up at the windows. She walked the whole perimeter, stopping every few feet to look down at the ground and along the fences, then up at the next second-floor window.
When they reached the street again Officer Porter said, “I’m sorry. That’s about as far as we can go. No response, no car in the garage, nothing broken or obviously tampered with, no scrapes like a door was jimmied, no broken windows, no tracks or paint chips or anything near the windows, not even any scrapes on the fences as though somebody had climbed over. The neighbors haven’t seen or heard anything. Mrs. Ellis is an adult, so if she wanted to leave, she had every right.”
Warren said, “I know. We have to assume that’s what happened. But I have a bad feeling about this.”
The cop looked around her as though to be sure nobody was going to hear. “So do I. But the world has gotten sick of cops who had an unsupported suspicion and acted on it. We’ve got nothing to hang it on.”
“I know. But she came to me with evidence that some of her investment accounts are being drained. It’s pretty unusual for a client to come to me with good reason to believe she’s being robbed, and then disappear and stop answering her phone, even when her closest friends call her. And meanwhile I had two men follow me on my way home and shoot at me. It’s unusual to have people shoot at me.”
“I’m sure it is,” Officer Porter said. “You’ve got a detective assigned to your case, right?”
“Yes. Sergeant McHargue.”
“Must be another station. You can ask him to apply for a warrant and take a look inside. You know that, right?”
“Sure. I may give that a try, but I don’t think I’ve got anything that a judge would call probable cause. About all I can do right now is report her missing.”
“I think that’s the right thing to do. But don’t call the Missing Persons Unit. Go in person to the West Valley Station at 19020 Vanowen. It will help that they can see you’re not a lunatic or a creep.”
“You’re sure they’ll see that?”
“Reasonably sure.” She didn’t smile. They could hear a call coming in over her car’s radio. “Sorry we didn’t find anything here. I’ve got to go take one of these calls.” She got into her patrol car, pulled away from the curb, and drove off.
Warren watched her car turn and disappear, and then went back along the side of the house. One of the reasons he had tagged along on her search was so the neighbors would see him with her, a uniformed cop. Given unconscious sexism, people had probably assumed the man in the suit was the female uniformed patrol officer’s superior.
The welfare check had not settled anything in his mind. Even though Mrs. Ellis’s car was gone, that didn’t mean she’d taken it. She had seemed eager for his phone call, but she wasn’t answering her phones. Her house was locked, but the alarm wasn’t turned on. At least that observation gave him something he could use. He cut across the back lawn to the trunk of a big tree beside the roof over the back porch, jumped to grasp the lowest branch, pulled himself up, reached for the branch above him, pulled himself up onto it, crawled a few feet on the limb to get above the roof, and stepped down onto the shingled surface. He stood and walked toward the place where the porch’s roof met the side of the house.
Some people in Los Angeles cooled their houses before the summer got too hot by opening upper windows. Sometimes when they closed the windows later, they could be lackadaisical about fastening the latches. Why worry? Nobody on the ground could see whether an upper window latch was open.
He reached the first set of windows. There were screens on them, so it was possible they were sometimes opened. He came close to the first one and saw the latch was locked. He moved to the second one, and that was locked too. He went to each window and leaned close with his eyes shaded and studied the inside of the house, half expecting to see the body of Vesper Ellis on the floor or on one of the beds. He saw nothing but expertly made beds and floors that shone with polishing. He paused. Maybe this was a foolish idea. Vesper Ellis had not seemed to be a person who would leave an unlocked window in her house.
The fourth window was different. When he looked closely, he could see that the latch was turned in the opposite direction from the others. He could hardly believe it. He reached into his pocket, took out his pocketknife, and opened the blade. He inserted it into the narrow space between the screen and the sill and pried the aluminum frame of the screen up very slightly, pried the hook out of the eye with the blade, pulled the bottom of the screen outward, slid it out of the guides that held the sides near the top, and set it down. Then he pushed the glass window upward with his thumbs until he could fit his fingers under it and slide the sash all the way up. He climbed in, slid the screen back into its guides, and hooked it in place, then closed the window.
Warren listened. He was aware that he had just committed the crime of breaking and entering, and that was enough to get him disbarred and possibly jailed, but he didn’t want to devote any time to thinking about that now.
He took a step deeper into the room. He knew that this was Vesper Ellis’s bedroom. The room was larger than the other bedrooms he’d seen from outside, and the bed was a California King rather than a double. The bed was made, with fresh sheets and the blanket pulled tight. There was no way to be sure if it had been done by Mrs. Ellis or by someone else to make it look as though all was well, but it was clear that she had not slept here the night after the bed had been made. He looked in the slightly open sliding door of the closet, and saw nothing but women’s clothes. None of them was the dress she’d worn to his office.
Warren moved on. He made his way from room to hall to room through the house. The most important thing he was looking for was any indication that Vesper Ellis might have been injured or killed or had left her house under somebody else’s power. He touched nothing, and he kept looking down to be sure he wasn’t about to step on any spot that might contain evidence. Before entering each room, he studied it from the doorway, first to be sure there was not a security camera. There seldom was one on the upper floor of a residence, but he didn’t want to be wrong and get recorded. He looked for anything that seemed to be out of place, any sign that a rug had been removed, or a spot on the floor that might have been cleaned with too much care.
The ground floor was perfect—too perfect. It was not strange that the spare bedrooms upstairs were perfectly clean, neat, and looking untouched. It wasn’t surprising that a woman like Vesper Ellis kept her own bedroom impeccable. The ground floor was not different, and it should have been. It had nothing out of place. The living room had no magazines or books on a table, no signs that it had been inhabited. There were a couple very good vases, but no flowers in them. He looked inside the mouths of both and could tell that in the past there had been water for plants that had left rings. It seemed to him that if a criminal wanted to mask the fact that the woman who lived here was gone, it would have been a good idea to remove any flowers, which would have wilted in a couple days.
The dining room looked as though it hadn’t ever been used, but that didn’t mean much. A young widow might not arrange formal dinners very often—might even have given it up when her husband died. He was eager to keep going to reach the kitchen. Almost anything on her counters or in her cupboards might tell him more than he knew now. What he was almost certain to learn something from was her refrigerator. Most of the food packages would have labels with dates on them, and if anything was out of character or out of place, he might spot it.
As he walked toward the doorway to the kitchen, he passed a tall wooden sideboard. He looked more closely as he walked by, and saw the slim silvery profile of a cell phone. It was lying on the top of one of the small glass-fronted cabinets that supported the big mirror of the sideboard, nearly six feet above the floor.
Warren’s gut tightened. Nobody, and especially no woman, would knowingly go anywhere for two days or more and leave her phone on top of a sideboard. He turned toward the window across the dining room. Why hadn’t he or Officer Porter seen the phone through the window? They had both looked, and both had suspected there was something strange going on.
He looked at the top of the sideboard again. The light had changed since they’d walked around the house. As the afternoon sun had sunk lower, its rays had shone more directly in the window and through the thin white curtains. The phone was almost fully in a ray of bright light now. He looked at his watch and noted the time. It was five eighteen exactly.
Warren turned, walked to the staircase, and climbed back up to the second floor. He went into the master bedroom, climbed out the window, walked along the roof to the overhanging limb of the big tree, lowered himself to hang by his arms, and dropped to the ground.
He walked around the outside of the house and looked into the dining room window to be sure. Then he took out his phone and called Sergeant McHargue.
When McHargue answered, Warren said, “Hello, Sergeant. This is Charles Warren. I think that Officer Porter and I missed something when we were doing the walk-around at Vesper Ellis’s house. I’m at the dining room window, and I see something on top of the big sideboard that might be a cell phone. I don’t know if it’s hers or not, but if it is—”
“I get it. I’ve got the address,” McHargue said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”