Two weeks after Michaela’s final session, I spotted a paragraph at the backof the Metro section.
Abduction Hoax Couple Sentenced
A pair of would-be actors accused of faking their own kidnapping in order togarner attention for their careers has been sentenced to community service aspart of a plea-deal arranged between the Sheriff’s Department, the DistrictAttorney, and the Public Defender’s Office.
Dylan Roger Meserve, 24, and Michaela Ally Brand, 23, had been charged witha series of misdemeanors that could have led to jail time, stemming from falseclaims of being carjacked in West Los Angeles and driven to Latigo Canyon inMalibu by a masked gunman. Subsequent investigation revealed that the duo hadset up the incident, going so far as to tie themselves up and simulate two daysof starvation.
“This was the best resolution,” said Deputy D.A. Heather Bally, in charge ofprosecuting the duo. She cited the couple’s youth and the absence of priorcriminal record, and emphasized the benefits Meserve and Brand could provide tothe “theater community,” citing two summer theater programs to which the pairmight be assigned: Theater Kids in Baldwin Hills and The Drama Posse in East Los Angeles.
Calls to the sheriff’s office were not returned.
One continuance had done the trick. I wondered if the two of them wouldbother to stay in town. Probably, if visions of stardom still stuffed theirheads.
I’d sent my $160 invoice to Lauritz Montez’s office, still hadn’t gottenpaid. I called him, left a polite message with a machine, and went aboutforgetting the case.
Lieutenant Detective Milo Sturgis had different ideas.
 
I’d spent New Year’s alone and the ensuing weeks had been nothing to warbleabout.
The dog I shared with Robin Castagna turned ancient overnight.
Spike, a twenty-five-pound French bulldog with fire-log physique and thediscerning eye of a practiced snob, had scoffed at the notion of joint custodyand gone to live with Robin. During his last few months of life, hisself-absorbed worldview had faded pathetically as he’d slipped into sleepypassivity. When he started to go downhill, Robin let me know. I began droppingby her house in Venice,sat on her saggy couch while she built and restored stringed instruments in herstudio down the hall.
Spike actually allowed me to hold him, rested his cement-block head under myarm. Looking up from time to time with eyes turned filmy gray by cataracts.
Each time I left, Robin and I smiled at each other for the briefest ofmoments, never discussed what was imminent, or anything else.
The last time I saw Spike, neither the tap-tap of Robin’s mallet nor thewhine of her power tools roused him and his muscle tone was bad. Offers of foodtreats dangled near his crusted nose evoked no response. I watched the slow,labored heave of his rib cage, listened to the rasp of his breathing.
Congestive heart failure. The vet said he was tired but not in pain, therewas no reason to put him down unless we couldn’t tolerate watching him go thisway.
He fell asleep in my lap and when I lifted his paw it felt cold. I rubbed itwarmer, sat for a while, carried him to his bed, placed him down gently, andkissed his knobby forehead. He smelled surprisingly good, like a freshlyshowered athlete.
As I saw myself out, Robin kept working on an old Gibson F5 mandolin.Six-figure instrument, heavy concentration required.
I stopped at the door and looked back. Spike’s eyes were closed and his flatface was peaceful, almost childlike.
The next morning, he gasped three times and passed away in Robin’s arms. Shephoned me and cried out the details. I drove to Venice, wrapped the body, called thecremation service, stood by as a nice man carried the pathetically small bundleaway. Robin was in her bedroom, still weeping. When the man left, I went inthere. One thing led to another.
 
During the time Robin and I were apart, she hooked up with another man and Ifell in and out of love with a smart, beautiful psychologist named AllisonGwynn.
I still saw Allison from time to time. Occasionally the physical pull we’dboth felt asserted itself. As far as I knew, she wasn’t seeing anyone else. Ifigured it was only a matter of time.
New Years she’d been in Connecticutwith her grandmother and a host of cousins.
She’d sent me a necktie for Christmas. I’d reciprocated with a Victoriangarnet brooch. I still wasn’t sure what had gone wrong. From time to time itbothered me that I couldn’t seem to hold on to a relationship. Sometimes Iwondered what I’d say if I was sitting in The Other Chair.
I told myself introspection could rot your brain, better to concentrate onother people’s problems.
It was Milo who ended up providingdistraction, at nine a.m. on a cold, dry Monday morning, one week after thehoax settlement.
“That girl you evaluated—Mikki Brand, the one who faked her abduction? Theyfound her body last night. Strangled and stabbed.”
“Didn’t know her nickname was Mikki.” The things you say when you’re caughtoff guard.
“That’s what her mother calls her.”
“She’d know,” I said.
 
I met him at the scene forty minutes later. The murder had taken placesometime Sunday night. By now, the area had been cleaned and scraped andanalyzed, yellow tape taken down.
The sole remnants of brutality were short pieces of the white rope thecoroner’s drivers use to bind the body after they wrap it in heavy-dutytranslucent plastic. Filmy gray plastic. Same hue, I realized, ascataract-dimmed eyes.
Michaela Brand had been found in a grassy area fifty feet west of Bagley Avenue, northof National Boulevard,where the streets cut under the 10 freeway. A faint, oblong gloss caught sunlightwhere the body had compressed the weeds. The overpass provided cold shade andrelentless noise. Graffiti boasted and raged on concrete walls. In some placesthe vegetation was waist high, crabgrass vying for nutrition with ragweed anddandelions and low, creeping things I couldn’t identify.
This was city property, part of the freeway easement, sandwiched between thetailored, affluent streets of Beverlywood to the north and the working-classapartment buildings of Culver Cityto the south. A few years back, there’d been some gang problems, but I hadn’theard of anything lately. Still, it wouldn’t be a place where I’d walk atnight, and I wondered what had brought Michaela here.
Her apartment on Holt was a couple of miles away. In L.A., that’s a drive, not a walk. Herfive-year-old Honda hadn’t been located, and I wondered if she’d been jacked.
For real, this time.
Too ironic.
Milo said, “What’re you thinking?”
I shrugged.
“You look contemplative. Let it out, man.”
“Nothing to say.”
He ran his hand over his big, lumpy face, squinted at me as if we’d justbeen introduced. He was dressed for messy work: rust-colored nylon windbreaker,wash-and-wear white shirt with a curling collar, skinny oxblood tie thatresembled two lengths of beef jerky, baggy brown trousers, and tan desert bootswith pink rubber soles.
His fresh haircut was the usual “style,” meaning skinned at the sides, whichemphasized all the white, thick and black on top, a cockscomb of competingcowlicks. His sideburns now drooped a half inch below fleshy earlobes,suggesting the worst type of Elvis impersonator. His weight had stabilized; myguess was two sixty on his seventy-four-inch frame, a lot of it abdomen.
When he stepped away from the overpass, sunlight amplified his acne pits andgravity’s cruel tendencies. We were months apart in age. He liked to tell me Iwas aging a lot more slowly than he was. I usually replied that circumstanceshad a way of changing fast.
He makes a big deal about not caring how he looks, but I’ve long suspectedthere’s a self-image buried down deep in his psyche: Gay But Not What YouExpect.
Rick Silverman’s long given up on buying him clothes that never get worn.Rick gets his hair trimmed every two weeks at a high-priced West Hollywood salon. Milo drives,every two months, to La Brea and Washington where he hands his seven bucks plustip to an eighty-nine-year-old barber who claims to have cut Eisenhower’s hairduring World War II.
I visited the shop once, with its gray linoleum floors, creaky chairs,yellowed Brylcreem posters featuring smiling, toothy white guys, and similarlyantique pitches for Murray’sstraightening pomade aimed at the majority black clientele.
Milo liked to brag about the Ikeconnection.
“Probably a one-shot deal,” I said.
“Why’s that?”
“So Maurice could avoid a court-martial.”
That conversation, we’d been in an Irish bar on Fairfax near Olympic, drinking Chivas andconvincing ourselves we were lofty thinkers. A man and a woman he’d beenpretending to look for had been nabbed at a traffic stop in Montana and were fighting extradition. They’dslain a vicious murderer, a predator who’d sorely needed killing. The law hadno use for moral subtlety and news of the capture led Miloto deliver a cranky, philosophical sermon. Downing a double, he apologized forthe lapse and changed the subject to barbering.
“Maurice isn’t courant enough for you?”
“Wait long enough, and everything becomes courant. ”
“Maurice is an artist.”
“I’m sure George Washington thought so.”
“Don’t be an ageist. He can still handle those scissors.”
“Such dexterity,” I said. “He should’ve gone to med school.”
His green eyes grew bright with amusement and grain alcohol. “Couple ofweeks ago, I was giving a talk to a Neighborhood Watch group in West Hollywood Park. Crime prevention, basic stuff. Igot the feeling some of the young guys weren’t paying attention. Later, one ofthem came up to me. Skinny, tan, Oriental tats on the arm, all that cut muscle.Said he dug the message but I was the stodgiest gay man he’d ever met.”
“Sounds like a come-on.”
“Oh, sure.” He tugged at a saggy jowl, released skin, took a swallow. “Itold him I appreciated the compliment but he should be paying more attention towatching his back when he cruised. He thought that was a double entendre andleft cracking up.”
“West Hollywood’s the sheriff,” I said. “Whyyou?”
“You know how it is. Sometimes I’m the unofficial spokesman for lawenforcement when the audience is alternative.”
“Captain pressured you.”
“That, too,” he said.
 
I walked over to where Michaela had been found. Miloremained several feet back, reading the notes he’d taken last night.
A flash of white stood out among the weeds. Another nub of coroner’s rope.The drivers had trimmed the bindings because Michaela had been a slim girl.
I knew what had happened at the scene: her pockets emptied, her nailscleaned of detritus, hair combed out, any “product” collected. Finally,attendants had packaged her and lifted her onto a gurney and wheeled her upinto a white coroner’s van. By now she’d be waiting, along with dozens of otherplastic bundles, stacked neatly on a shelf in one of the large, cool rooms thatline the gray hallways of the basement crypt on Mission Road.
They treat the dead with respect at Mission Road, but the backlog—the sheervolume of bodies—can’t help but leach out the dignity.
I picked up the rope. Smooth, substantial. As it had to be. How did itcompare to the yellow binding Michaela and Dylan had purchased for their“exercise”?
Where was Dylan now?
I asked Milo if he had any idea.
He said, “First thing I did was call the number on his arrest form.Disconnected. Haven’t located his landlord. Michaela’s, either.”
“She told me she was running out of money, had a month’s grace beforeeviction.”
“If she did get evicted, be good to know where she’s been crashing. Thinkthey could’ve moved in together?”
“Not if she was leveling with me,” I said. “She blamed the whole thing onhim.”
I scanned the dump site. “Not much blood. Killed somewhere else?”
“Looks that way.”
“Who found the body?”
“Woman walking her poodle. Dog sniffed it out, pronto.”
“Strangled and stabbed.”
“Manual strangulation, hard enough to crush the larynx. The follow-up wasfive stab wounds to the chest and one to the neck.”
“Nothing around the genitalia?”
“She was fully clothed, nothing overtly sexual about the pose.”
Strangulation itself can be a sexual thing. Some lust killers describe it asthe ultimate dominance. It takes a long time to stare into the face of astruggling, gasping human being and watch the life force seep out. One monsterI interviewed laughed about it.
“Time goes quickly when you’re having fun, Doc.”
I said, “Anything under her nails?”
“Nothing overly interesting, let’s see what the lab comes up with. No hairfibers, either. Not even from the dog. Apparently, poodles don’t shed much.”
“Any of the wounds defensive?”
“No, she was dead before the cutting started. The neck wound was a littlestick to the side, but it got the jugular.”
“Five’s too many for impulse cuts but less than you’d expect from anoverkill frenzy. Any pattern?”
“With her clothes on, it was hard to see much of anything except wrinklesand blood. I’ll be at the autopsy, let you know.”
I stared at the glossy spot.
Milo said, “So she blamed Meserve for thehoax. Lots of love lost?”
“She said she’d come to hate him.”
“Hatred’s a fine motive. Let’s try to locate this movie star.”