Линда Ла Плант - Cold Blood

Elizabeth Caley sighed, leaning against the door. ‘I’m too tired to talk now, you’ll have to come back. Tomorrow maybe, Phyllis will organize everything.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Caley,’ Lorraine said.

Elizabeth beckoned to her. She was not in any way out of control now, but almost steely. ‘I want a private word with you. Will you assist me to my room?’

Rooney watched them leave before he smiled at Phyllis. She closed the doors with an abruptness that made it obvious she was angry that Rosie had misled her. She turned her small, frosty eyes to Rooney.

‘Well, what payments do you require, Mr Rooney?’

‘There are three of us who will be working on this. Thousand a week.’

Phyllis nodded, moving further into the room. ‘Three thousand a week and expenses, which I presume will be at the same rate the other agencies have requested?’

Rooney’s jaw dropped a fraction; he’d sort of calculated the thousand dollars was for the three of them.

‘I will need receipts of all your expenses,’ Phyllis said curtly as she flipped open a small note-book.

Rooney beamed. ‘You’ll have them, Miss Collins.’

He couldn’t believe their luck.

Lorraine did not get in to see Elizabeth Caley’s bedroom. As they reached the door to her suite, she drew Lorraine closer.

‘Can you find her?’

‘I will most certainly try, Mrs Caley.’

She nodded, chewing her lip, and then leaned closer still. ‘I will give you an incentive. If you find her, you will get a one-million-dollar bonus.’

Lorraine blinked. ‘One million.’

‘Yes. I want my daughter traced, Mrs Page.’

Lorraine turned to look down the wide staircase and then after a moment, keeping her voice as steady as she could, she repeated, ‘One million?’

Mrs Caley nodded.

Lorraine eased her weight from one foot to the other. Her voice was soft, as low as Mrs Caley’s, but she didn’t hesitate. ‘Dead or alive, Mrs Caley?’

‘If you trace her, dead or alive, Mrs Page, you will receive one million dollars.’

‘Can I have that in writing?’

The soft white hand with the blood-red nails gripped hold of Lorraine’s in a firm, fast handshake, and she once again got the impression that Elizabeth Caley was like two people; publicly, she was the showcase movie star, the consummate actress, but beneath the show there was something else, something she had not picked up on earlier — and it wasn’t the underlying steely quality she’d expected. Elizabeth Caley was very, very frightened. Up close, the pupils of her slanting brown eyes were over-large, and Lorraine knew she was using drugs of some kind.

Not until they had driven out of the electronic gates did Rooney let out a whistle. ‘One grand each for two weeks, all expenses on top. Plane tickets, hotels, we got total carte blanche, no expenses spared. Rosie was fucking right, this is a big cash deal all right.’

Lorraine gave him a sidelong look and then stared ahead. ‘There’s a bonus,’ she said quietly. He looked puzzled. ‘If we find Anna Louise we get one million dollars.’

He braked, and she had to press her hands on the dashboard to stop herself from sliding down the seat.

‘What? Are you kiddin’?’

‘No, not kidding. She’s going to put it in writing.’ She slipped on the safety belt.

‘Fuck me, one million. Holy shit.’

Lorraine gave a tiny smile. ‘Dead or alive.’

‘Fucking hell.’ He shook his head in disbelief.

‘Just one thing, Bill, two actually. Thanks for backing me up in there with that bastard Caley.’

Rooney accelerated again. ‘Think nothin’ of it, only said what I meant, he got to me. So what’s the other thing you wanna talk about, the split?’

Lorraine smiled. ‘No, that goes three ways. It’s just I run this investigation, Bill, not you, me. I give the orders, understood?’

He nodded. ‘Yeah, I hear you, it’s your show.’

‘Yes, it is,’ she said softly and then let out a yell, thumping his big wide shoulder. ‘One million!’

That same afternoon, Lorraine, Rooney and Rosie discussed how they would begin the investigation into the disappearance of Anna Louise Caley. First they would invoice the Caleys for an advance of salary. Rooney would approach the officers he knew had been or were still involved on the case in LA. This would cut down a lot of questions they would have to ask Mr and Mrs Caley, and before Lorraine talked to either of them she wanted as much background information as possible. All back issues of newspapers that had featured the girl’s disappearance had to be checked over at the library and xeroxed copies filed at the office.

They felt they were on a roll. One million dollars was one hell of an incentive.

That evening, Rooney met with the Dean Martin look-alike Detective Jim Sharkey for a liquid dinner. To begin with, Sharkey was non-committal; as far as he was concerned, the police had done about all they could do their end.

‘Consensus is, or was, she was kidnapped by persons unknown, though no ransom note was delivered. Other cases with similar characteristics would not have been kept open as long as this one.’

Rooney sniffed. ‘You sayin’ you had a lot of girls just disappearing?’

‘Yeah, a lot, Bill, and you gotta know it. We got a file as long as my arm on missing kids, and we try checkin’ out most of them. Believe me, we spent more time on this one because of the high profile of the Caleys. She disappeared in New Orleans anyway, so there was not a lot we could do this end. We even sent a few guys there to dig around but they came up with nothing, and they’re not the friendliest bunch of bastards, kinda suggested we back off.’

‘So you did?’

‘Yeah, we got nothin’ from LA, and we interviewed every kid she knew.’

‘Was the Caley girl into drugs?’

‘Nope, squeaky clean. You know, with no body discovered after eleven months, some of the guys reckoned the girl maybe just took off.

Bill sighed, leaning back in his chair. ‘Anythin’ come up against the parents?’

Sharkey looked askance. ‘What? Give me that again? They’ve fuckin’ hired the best in the business, if they’d had anythin’, anythin’ to do with their own kid’s disappearance, believe me, we’d have sniffed it. And the broad, she was weepin’ her heart out.’

‘Mrs Caley?’

Sharkey nodded. ‘She must have been one hell of a woman, still is. Geez, what a figure, and I’m tellin’ you, Bill, I never been one for older women, know what I mean? But fuck me, well, I’d like to give her a roll in the hay, no kiddin’.’

Rooney nodded. The fact that the pair of them hadn’t pulled a woman in twenty years unless they’d paid for it did not prevent their classic male ego from believing they could. They sank a few more beers, then switched to vodka. The dinner had been a long one. At midnight they called a cab, and made their way back to Sharkey’s precinct in uptown LA. Sharkey held his liquor well and even though he was off duty, he refused to let Rooney come into the station with him. To have ex-Captain Bill Rooney in tow breathing beer fumes over everyone could cause problems, even more so considering what he had agreed to do.

Rooney waited in the cab. It was almost an hour before Sharkey rejoined him and slipped him a thick xeroxed file of information. It had been an expensive afternoon, Rooney thought as Sharkey accepted the folded bills with a wink. He’d asked for five hundred dollars and a guarantee that if any questions were ever asked the files never came from him. Rooney never even mentioned the thirty-five-buck cab fare, he was too eager to get the statements back to Lorraine.

Lorraine worked on Sharkey’s information well into the night. As far as she could make out, Anna Louise Caley was a well-liked, friendly and very pampered young lady. The students in her year who had been questioned didn’t have a bad word to say about her. All the students and teachers alike made references to her being very pretty or even beautiful; none referred to her academic prowess but she was said to have been an excellent tennis player, swimmer, horse rider and all-round athlete. She had no steady boyfriend but Lorraine ringed the names of the boys that had admitted to dating her up until the time of her disappearance. She decided she would target them first. She had the names of numerous female students who all claimed to have been Anna Louise’s best friend, so they were lined up second. Then came the coaches and the college teachers. It was going to be a race against time: with only two weeks on the case, she had set aside only two days to complete the LA research.