Jonathan Kellerman - Heartbreak Hotel

Police say Drancy’s m.o. was to leverage his fake aristocracy in order to consign expensive jewelry from other merchants with no down payment. The items were then marked up and unloaded on hare-brained heirs and heiresses.

Though chronically late paying his suppliers, Drancy did eventually come through and the scheme worked so well that he was able to open a jewelry store on Rodeo Drive, the poshest shopping street in Beverly Hills. There, he kept raising the stakes by “investing” in progressively more expensive gewgaws that he continued to peddle to naïve West Coast celebrities. It was only when a robbery cleaned out Drancy’s stock and exposed his lack of insurance that furious gem dealers began digging into his background and uncovered his shady past. Drancy hightailed it from LaLa Land, laid low for a while, then had the chutzpah to re-invent himself as an Old Masters expert in Manhattan without even changing his ersatz name.

Drancy’s Gotham scheme finally met an end when a Long Island City storage unit housing paintings he’d “borrowed” was broken into and looted. Drancy is currently in The Tombs awaiting arraignment on multiple charges, though word has it that he may be able to skate because fancy-pants Upper East Side art dealers will be reluctant to expose themselves to ridicule at being shellacked by a career con-man with a sixth-grade education.

No mention of suspects in the art burglary. At the time, Leroy Hoke had resided in San Quentin.

I paired Hoke with a succession of keywords: laplante, drancy, midget, thalia, mars. The last pulled up gazillions of hits on the joys of astronomy and the virtues of candy bars.

The lack of anything else was consistent with Maxine Driver’s characterization of Hoke as publicity-shy. If he had masterminded the LaPlante job, entrusting his legitimately employed girlfriend with the take also fit. So would using her as his agent while in prison.

Thalia’s path to fortune was another nice mesh: Parlaying a cache of stolen jewelry into legal real estate purchases was Laundering 101.

A cute little city accountant could avoid scrutiny if she bought steadily and slowly. She’d certainly avoided scrutiny about living in a luxury hotel suite whose rent far surpassed her salary.

A tribute to her smarts? Or had she inherited connections from Hoke during the pre-Parker days when corruption was a municipal pastime?

If her wealth had been rooted in crime, had she come to feel guilty nearing the end of an astonishingly long life? Trying to atone with spontaneous acts of charity but, not content with that, deciding it was time to talk to someone about it?

Milo likes to say psychologists are the yea-sayers of our times. Who better than a psychologist who’d worked with the cops and knew something about the criminal mind when it came to setting a former moll’s mind at ease?

Or perhaps Thalia was just fine with the way she’d lived her life and the spawn of a man whose associates tended to disappear had shown up wanting to talk about that life.

Some scion of Monark’s family tree ferreting out Thalia’s link to his ancestor and believing himself entitled to whatever remained of Hoke’s fortune.

Scion or scions.

The Birkenhaars from Austria. Fake accent, most probably a fake name.

Assumed names, like the inflated biographies of celebrities and politicians, were often crafted to impress. Case in point: Fred Drancy aka Count Frederick et cetera LaPlante.

Was it a bud from his family tree that had sought to take root in Thalia’s life?

Lots of possibilities, but no facts. I couldn’t even be certain that the girl at Perino’s was Thalia.

Monark and Midget.

I studied the photo again. Made progress convincing myself. Considered calling Milo but decided not to, no sense dumping a whole lot of what-if on him, this early in the game.

At nine P.M., Robin was reading in bed and I was playing guitar in a corner chair. The Brazilian music she likes at night, lovely meld of simplicity that lulls the listener and complexity that challenges the player. I was trying some new chord inversions on “Corcovado” when the phone rang.

Milo said, “Mr. Waters is absent no more. Oops, poor choice of words. He’s here, but he’s gone.”

The dump site was in Pacific Palisades, above Pacific Coast Highway, just past the Getty Villa and up a skinny bait-worm of a street.

Unremarkable houses sat on too-small lots. The air was cool and salty and expensive. Between the meager space separating the homes, glimpses of ocean flashed, starlit onyx. I drove until a cop slouching against a cruiser stopped me.

My name got me waved to the end of the block. A construction site, what looked to be the beginnings of a mega-mansion.

Block foundation, wooden framing, fake-tile roof, all of which appeared shopworn. Heaps of trash filled most of the lot. An Andy Gump with its door agape and a poorly tended rent-a-fence completed the picture: The project hadn’t been worked on for a while.

The drive-in gate was chain-locked but the fence, high and topped by barbed wire, sported a man-sized hole. Milo had filled me in as I drove. Discovery of the body had been accidental, a pair of lovebirds, barely thirteen, sneaking out of their houses a few blocks east, had hurried over to the site with plans of passion amid rusted rebar, warped plywood, and rotting roof shingles.

A regular thing for the kids, as it turned out. Nice to know the girl/boy-next-door thing had durability.

This time, a stench gave them pause, curiosity surpassing true love and hormones.

Tracing the reek, the kids had discovered something rotted worse than the shingles. Horror-struck but fascinated, they’d illuminated the body with the flashlight the girl always brought because she was studying ballet and didn’t want to “fall down and mess up my body in the dark.”

Romeo and Juliet stood off to the side now, near an officer absently working his cellphone. Both were blond, cute, skinny, the girl taller and surprisingly composed. The boy cowered next to her, eyes hazed by huge, red-rimmed designer eyeglasses.

Milo said, “Sean and Shawna. Adorable, no? All four parents are M.D.’s and pals and were out to dinner. On their way back, now, and mightily irritated. I might need to offer the young’uns some police protection.”

His smile was a grim strobe. “Little Lothario looks freaked out, no? Maybe he’ll need you, as well.”

I said, “Nothing like ambulance chasing. It’s definitely Waters?”

“We’ll verify with prints but, yeah, there’s enough left to say it is.”

“Where’s the body?”

He pointed at one of the junk heaps. I moved toward it.

He said, “Sure, why not.”

Gerard Waters’s naked body had been covered with objects taken from the trash, each one tagged with an evidence marker: scrap wood, broken blocks, a sheet of black plastic tarp pocked by little jagged holes that Milo assured me were the work of Mickey and Minnie. “They chewed on him a little, too. Over here. And here.”

Indicating the ragged tips of fingers. And toes. Then a pile of vomit.

“Courtesy Sean. After Shawna pulled back the tarp and exposed the face.”

I said, “Tough girl.”

Milo said, “Blood doesn’t bother her, she wants to be a surgeon like Daddy and Mommy. They run a plastic practice in Malibu. Nip and tuck won’t help Mr. Waters.”

Another point: neck flesh flaccid and sloughing. A hunk of shoulder mottled like overripe cheese.

I said, “He wearing anything?”

“Stripped nude.”

I bent and took a closer look. The face was bloated and decaying, folds and wrinkles filled with fluid and gas, straining like the seams of too-tight trousers. Crime lab pole-lights accentuated the damage but failed to clarify the precise color of the skin. I guessed gray. Maybe overlaid with purple. Maybe even some green.