Who Killed Jenny Schecter? Ch. 28

"Maybe you should show Shane her photo."

"You know, that's not such a bad idea. Although I wonder how Shane would feel about narcing on her customers. My guess is she'd be very reluctant to do that. Anyway, being a runaway isn't illegal, and her status as a juvenile expired when she turned 18. She's still on the books as an open missing persons case, but if we did find her, she's perfectly within her rights to tell us to go screw ourselves."

"Maybe. But maybe she should at least tell her parents she's alive and well."

"If she is well."

***

Mrs. Harold Hooker lived in a modest single-story ranch-style home just up from the cul-de-sac on a quiet street of small homes, many ranch style and some Spanish style with red tile roofs, in a development sandwiched between Los Verdes Golf Course and the Vicente Bluffs Reserve, just north of the formidable cliffs that lined the Point Vicente Interpretive Center and the Point Vicente Lighthouse. Lauren drove the winding Hawthorne Boulevard past the golf course, crested a hill, and found herself on a downward slope with the blue, blue, blue Pacific Ocean up ahead. Some 20 miles to the south past the lighthouse on the point Santa Catalina Island lay basking in the early afternoon haze, but Lauren and Carmen couldn't see it from the road.

Still, "Wow," Lauren whispered, seeing the view.

"I know," Carmen said. "I've always loved the coast along here. Shane and I came here once for whale-watching. We saw a bunch of Pacific gray whales heading south. They were fantastic."

The land in this part of LA County was dry and arid, like most of the region. Down at the bottom of the slope at the cliff line they could see palm trees, and there were many palms of several different types along with fruit trees, yuccas and cactus. Lauren turned off Hawthorne near the top of the slope and in a moment they were in front of Mrs. Hooker's home. The front of the house faced up the slope and inland, which was fine with people who lived on that side of the street, because the view they had from their back porches, patios and backyards was spectacular. The people across the street had spectacular views, too, but from their front windows and front yards. If they sat out back in the evening, the had very little view at all, just the top of the crest, and no sunset.

They got out of the car and started up the driveway toward the front door. Just then the garage door started to open, and when it was up they saw a pleasant, slightly chunky woman in her late 50s standing there waiting for them. "Hi," she said. "I assume you are Detective Hancock? And you must be Officer Morales."

"That's right," Lauren said smiling and holding out her badge case and ID.

"Oh, I don't need to see that," Mrs. Hooker said. "Come on in, get out of that hot sun."

The garage was wide enough for two vehicles, and a silver Honda Accord was parked in the bay closest to the house and the interior garage door. The other bay was filled with filing cabinets, three rows of them, one row against the far wall and along the back of the bay, and a separate island of cabinets back to back. Lauren and Carmen stared at them.

Mrs. Hooker laughed. "That's what a lifetime of being a private eye gets you. Filing cabinets full of cases. I told Ace, you probably have enough blackmail material to put the screws to most of California."

"Ace?" Carmen asked.

"My husband, Harold," Mrs. Hooker said. "He went by Harry to most people. I usually called him Ace. Ace Ventura Detective Agency. Sometimes Sam, for Sam Spade, or Dick Tracy. When I was pissed about something or other, I called him Miles. That's for Miles Archer, one of the bad guys in--"

"--The Maltese Falcon," Carmen said. "He got shot five minutes into it."

"You know your old classics," Mrs. Hooker said. "That was his favorite. That's why he called his detective agency Spade and Archer."

"We thought it was brilliant marketing," Lauren said.

"It was," Mrs. Hooker said. "Can I get you anything? Water? Iced tea? Sodas?"

"Oh, thanks, we ate on the way here," Lauren said.

"You want to come in the house and talk? Or we can go out on the patio. My guess is you want something here from his files, though. My legs aren't good as they used to be. I can't stand out here on this hard concrete too long."

She pushed a button on the wall near the house door and the garage door closed. She walked to it and took a large, hefty padlock of a hook on the wall and padlocked the garage door shut from the inside.

"That's some door and lock," Lauren said.

"Steel reinforced. Heavy duty, close to burglar-proof short of using dynamite. Some friends in the private detective business advised me to make sure nobody could get in here without me knowing or setting off a ton of alarms. This whole place is wired and monitored like you wouldn't believe. It's because of what's in those files. Not that I know anything about what's in them, all I know is, I need to protect them."

Lauren and Carmen followed her into the house, through the spotless and nicely kept kitchen, and out onto the back patio. As Lauren had suspected, the view of the Pacific down at the bottom of the slope was spectacular.

"I like to come out here in the evening and watch the sunset, and talk to Harry," Mrs. Hooker said. "I reckon he's out there somewhere." She meant the Pacific Ocean. They sat in chairs around a glass-topped table. The back yard was small, but nicely landscaped southwestern style, with cactus, ornamental weeds, and plants in bright Talavera pottery featuring sun themes.

"I'm sorry for your loss," Lauren said. "I hate to ask, but what can you tell us about his disappearance?"

"Not a lot to tell," Mrs. Hooker said. "We had a timeshare down in Ensenada, had it for years. Still do, only I haven't been back because... well, it wouldn't be the same without Ace. Guess I ought to sell it to one of those outfits that buys timeshares. Anyway, we had the same two weeks every year, second and third weeks of March, after the heavy tourist season and before the weather got too awful hot. Ace loved to go sport-fishing, he had his favorite captain, Manuel DeGarza, down at Sergio's Sport-fishing Marina right in the harbor downtown. He could walk there from our condo. He'd go out every chance he could, fishing for yellowtail or bonito. There's these two islands about 12 miles out called Islas Todos Santos, Islands of All Saints. Nothing on them except two lighthouse and a bunch of seals and sea birds. Anyway, there's lots of good fishing out there. Off the northwest point, there's a long, deep underwater canyon. Surfers love it, because the waves come up that canyon and break off the tip off the island. They even call the place 'Killers,' because the waves are so big. But you go out further away from the breakers and there's some great fishing out there in that canyon. Ace would catch whatever he felt like, way more than we could ever eat, and at the dock he'd keep two or three fish they cleaned right there, and he'd give some to the boat captain, and he'd give the rest away to local kids. They knew to look for him coming back from Todos Santos. 'Senor Harry, Senor Harry,' they'd all shout when they saw the boat coming back in."

"Did he always go out by himself?" Carmen asked.

"No, not always. Sometimes one of his buddies from Hollywood would come down, and once in a while the captain asked if one or two other clients could come along. Once it was a famous TV actor from one of those police shows, I guess he was a client, not just an acquaintance, but of course I never asked. We first started coming down here, I used to go out, too, just for the ride, you know, and the sun, and keep them company. Saw a lot of whales. Good whale-watching out there at the right time of year. But after a few trips I got bored, and you know, I gotta be careful about the skin cancer. I had to have some spots removed. So he'd go out and I'd stay and play canasta with my friends in the air-conditioned shade."

"Tell me what happened that last time," Lauren said.

"We came down Sunday morning, like we always did. The timeshare ran from Sunday to the following Saturday, but for two weeks."

"Sunday, March 8," Lauren said.

"That sounds right. The second week in March?"

"Yes."

"So we came down, Ace went out fishing Monday, he couldn't wait to get out there. He went out a couple days more. It was Friday he went out again, and they never came back. At first I wasn't too worried. They usually got back early or mid-afternoon. Once, though, there was some other boat out there ran out of gas, and they helped the guy out, towed him in, and that took longer, but Ace called when they got into cellphone range, and I wasn't worried. Couple times, especially if he was with a friend, they'd stop at a bar and have a couple of beers with Manuel. Sometimes he'd help Manuel clean up the boat. I was in a pottery class that afternoon, I like to make pottery. I made those pots." She pointed to the Talavera pieces on the patio. "I got home about four, Ace wasn't home yet, but I didn't think anything about it. Five o'clock came, then six, no phone call, nothing. So I called him. No answer. I thought, well, they're sitting in a bar, and he can't hear it ring. But we were supposed to go out to dinner. I called the marina. They said Manuel's boat hadn't got back yet. That's when I started to get a little worried. But you know, the weather was fine, no storms, no nothing out there, nothing like that. I waited until I couldn't stand it any more, and called back about 8 o'clock. The dockmaster said he was getting concerned, too, and he'd ask around. He got on the radio, started asking other boats out there if they'd seen Manuel. Most of the boats had come back in the early afternoon, like they do, and then gone back out on their second trips of the day, you know sunset cruises, whale-watching, whatever. So there were a lot of boats out there. Nobody had seen Manuel since that morning. There were no distress calls from anyone, no boat fires, nobody ran out of gas. Nothing. Finally I asked him to call Mexican Maritime Search and Rescue. That's their version of our Coast Guard. They have a base right there in Ensenada Harbor. They have a couple of boats and some helicopters. They sent a boat out and put a helicopter up, but they didn't find anything or see anything unusual. They looked real good all around Todos Santos, too, right before it got dark, in case the boat went ashore on the rocks somehow, but there was nothing. They called off the search at midnight but started back up at first light again on Saturday, and all that weekend. Nothing. By then I was talking to Mrs. DeGarza, too, and she was as worried as I was. They have a couple of kids, you know? So it wasn't like Manuel to go off on a bender or anything. Long story short, we never saw or heard anything from them to this day. Search and Rescue filed reports with the police department and all, and officers came out and Mrs. DeGarza and I talked to them."

Lauren and Carmen let a long silence go by.

"I'm sorry," Lauren finally said. "Tell me, what do you think happened?"

Mrs. Hooker looked at her. Her eyes were wet. She looked out over the ocean. "I have no idea. Something happened. The boat sprang a leak. Some kind of accident. Trouble is, there was no debris. Nobody saw smoke or fire or an explosion. No distress calls, no SOS. Whatever happened, it happened out of sight of all the other boats. I mean, maybe they went up the coast or down the coast for some reason, and whatever happened, it happened up or down or a lot further out. Or maybe a drug smuggler hijacked the boat and took a load of drugs up to San Diego. Who knows."

"But what do you think?" Lauren asked quietly.

Mrs. Hooker looked at her and bit her lip.

"You think something bad happened."

"You're here, aren't you?" Mrs. Hooker said. "I've been waiting. For two years. I know my Ace. He didn't run away. He's not living in Buenos Aires or Italy or some damn place with his new 20-year-old wife. He hasn't had a hard-on in ten years. He's dead. I know he's dead, I just don't know how or why, that's all. And yes, sure, the first thing I thought about was his work. Something related to that."

"So what happened to his business? What did you do when you got back to LA?"

"I stayed down there in the timeshare, then came home alone at the end of the second week. In the meantime, I had called everybody. You know, his sister in Phoenix. His lawyer. A couple of other private eyes he worked with."

"Tell me about his lawyer."

"It was a guy he worked with a lot. Had major studio connections. He didn't know anything specific. Together we talked to the LA Missing Persons people, filed a report."

"LAPD or LA County?" Lauren asked.

"LAPD. We lived in the city back then. You're LA County, I think you said."

"That's right. If you lived in the city we wouldn't have had jurisdiction. What did LAPD and your lawyer say?"

"Not a lot. They looked into it, of course, but they had nothing. They wanted to look through Ace's files, but his lawyer said no way, not without a warrant and probable cause, and of course they didn't have any. And you know the law, right? I have to wait to have him declared legally dead. In the meantime, I talked it over with our lawyer and accountant, and decided to move out here. I sold our house and Ace's office. Bob, the lawyer, he said we had to keep all Ace's records and cases, we couldn't just throw everything out. Since Ace was missing, the legal stuff was a nightmare, but Bob took care of it. I have to keep all these records in case somebody needs something and has the proper paperwork and all."

"Has that happened?"

"Yes, a few times. There were two active cases Ace was working on, and lawyers and private detectives petitioned Bob to get those files and take over the cases. So we did that, gave them what they wanted. Bob was the one who made sure I got an extra strong, reinforced garage door and all the security measures. At first I talked about putting the files into storage somewhere, but it would cost more money than I had, and without Ace there was no income. We'd had a comfortable income and money in the bank, and investments and all. Ace did very well in the business. But after he went missing, you know, I had to start thinking about income and expenses, and all. So we decided I'd keep the files and just make sure they were safe. So there they are, in the garage. End of story. So tell me, why are you here?"

"Like I told you on the phone, we're working on a cold case, a homicide two years ago," Lauren said. "We only just learned recently that the victim, Jennifer Schecter, had apparently hired your husband to deal with a blackmail problem she had. Then she was murdered, we think by the blackmailer. We just found out Friday morning that Schecter had hired Mr. Hooker. At least we think so, that's what we need to confirm. We found a credit card payment to Spade and Archer about three weeks before her murder."

Mrs. Hooker nodded.

"Does the name Jenny Schecter ring a bell? Or her murder case?"

"No, not at all. The first thing I should probably tell you is, Ace was always very discreet about his work. I mean, really discreet. He specialized in movie stars and celebrities, as I guess you know by now, and he never, ever told me about his cases. I know he had tons of good dirt on hundreds of big-name people, because that's what he did. But he worked for them, not against them. He was one of the main go-to guys if somebody got in trouble, and you had to have absolute, iron-clad integrity and trust to keep getting hired. If people even had the slightest whiff you couldn't keep a secret, Ace would never work in this town again."

"The second thing I should tell you is one of the reasons Ace and I stayed happily married so long was I never asked him about his work, and I don't give a rat's patoot about Hollywood and all that stuff. I read books, I like classical music, I play canasta and do pottery that looks like Talavera. I could care less what bimbo was sleeping with who, who fathered so-and-so's baby, who's straight, who's secretly gay, who stuffed what up his nose. One night we were watching TV and there was a teaser commercial for a movie that was coming out. Ace started growling. I said, what's the matter? He says, 'Nothing. This guy is one of the biggest assholes in the state of California. You wouldn't believe some of the stuff he did.' And that's all he said, and I never asked. I'm not gonna tell who it was, but you'd know the name, everybody would. And to this day I have no idea what that actor did. I could probably find it on the Internet in three seconds. But I just don't care." She pointed to the filing cabinets. "It's probably in there somewhere, maybe. Do I understand you think maybe that murder case had something to do with Ace's disappearance?"

"It's become our working hypothesis," Lauren said. "It wasn't at first, because right after Jenny was murdered, one of her friends falsely confessed, and went to prison. She's still up in Humboldt now, as a matter of fact. So the case never got the full, proper investigation it should have. It gets messy and complicated, but the short version is, two years later we opened it back up for a better, closer look. And almost the first thing we discovered was a second murder, out in Bakersfield, that nobody in LA knew about. It was one of the women closely connected to the original group of women associated with Jenny and the events of her murder. Then just two weeks ago we re-interviewed another witness slash suspect at the time, and discovered Jenny and this woman, an actress, were being blackmailed. This woman said she and Jenny talked about hiring a private detective to find out who the blackmailer was, or deal with him. Then this woman said they had agreed not to hire the detective, but we suspected that might be a lie Jenny told her. So we looked and found the credit card payment to Spade and Archer. So here we are. It appears Jenny hired your husband, she was murdered a few weeks later, your husband disappeared a week after that, and then another person was murdered out in Bakersfield a few months later. If you count the boat captain, Manuel, you said his name was, that's four people, two clearly dead, two missing and probably dead."

"Too many to be a coincidence," Mrs. Hooker said, shaking her head.

"That's what we think, too," Lauren said.

Mrs. Hooker looked out over the Pacific Ocean. "Okay. Let me go call Bob. I think it will be all right, but I just want to call him. Are you two okay out here? Or do you want to come inside?"

Lauren looked at Carmen. "We're good out here," Lauren said. "The sun's nice. We'll work on our tans."

"I'll bring iced tea when I come out," Mrs. Hooker said, and went into her house.

Carmen waited until Mrs. Hooker was safely in house. "Want to take off our tops?"

"Tops, bottoms, underwear, gun, shoes, the works. But I don't think it's the most practical idea you've had all week. Best idea, yes. Doable, no."

"We could ask Mrs. Hooker to strip down and join us. She seems pretty hip."

"Would you sunbath nude in front of your mother?"

"No, probably not."

"Me, either. Let me just close my eyes and dream about it being just you and me."

They closed their eyes and let the sun beat down on them. After a while, Carmen said, "He's dead, isn't he?"

"Yes," Lauren said. "The boat captain, too."

"Got any idea how?"

"Pretty easy. Guy comes along the dock, says, hey, I hear the yellowtail are biting, can I go out with you? He's got pesos, he's happy to pay his share. Manuel and Ace say sure, okay. They go out. Somewhere out beyond Totos Santos he shoots them or bludgeons them, or whatever. Then he drives the boat far, far to the south or far, far to the north, well out of sight of any other boats and reasonably far from an eventual search area. He's got all damn day, he can go, what, 20 or 30 miles an hour for six or eight hours. He could go as long as there's fuel. Maybe he waits until dark. Then he wraps an anchor and anchor chain around the bodies and drops them in deep water. Then he finds a good deep spot not too far from shore, he shoots some holes in the bottom, sits there on the gunnel while it sinks, and when he's satisfied it's going to the bottom he swims ashore. Maybe he's done his homework and has picked his spot. Maybe he's left a car waiting. Or a bicycle, who knows. He walks, bikes or drives away. Boat's never found, because it's a hundred or two hundred miles away from where anyone would look for it. Bodies are never found, because sharks have had dinner on them."