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  Thornton sat forward. "I like it up here. Clean air, fish in the lake. The country's different now. Everybody out for himself, trying to make the most money. All the commercials are guys and dolls in business suits. The questions are all smaller. They don't matter as much. Whatever makes good TV. Lots of law. Lots of order."

  Merci thought about this. "Tuesday night a woman got murdered. I'm going to find the creep who did it. To me, the questions that matter are still the same. That's why I do what I do."

  Thornton smiled. Merci saw nothing condescending or humoring in it.

  "That's right. Now you got this Whittaker woman. I hope doesn't turn into your Patti Bailey. Hope you're not sitting on porch someday, fat and retired like me, and some sharp young cops wants to know why you didn't solve it."

  "No offense was meant here, Roy."

  "Offense? I hope you find out the truth, young lady. I hope you kickass and take names. I'd be offended if you didn't."

  "I will."

  "Look. I made a call. Bailey was tight with a sister and we kept touch. She had some interesting things to say, most of it too late to us. She'll talk to you. She's down the mountain, in Riverside. Here.” Thornton slipped a sheet of paper into the file, handed it back to her.

  "The phone's in the kitchen."

  • • •

  Merci followed a CHP escort back down the mountain, first or second gear most of the way, through the ferocious brightness of late morning. She had coffee at a truck stop, read the papers, watched the big rigs rumble in and out, checked through her blue notebook.

  She wrote: Nobody cared . . . let it slide . . . you let it slide when it's going your way . . . whose way is unsolved? Who benefits?

  She called both home and office to retrieve messages. Mike had called her at home before she left for Arrowhead, but she'd turned the recorder down when she heard his voice. The upshot was that Mike was sorrier and more ashamed than he could express to her. He left a message on her work machine, then two more at home. He sounded like he was about to cry. Listening to them, Merci felt pity and fury vying inside her. But beneath these predictable emotions, she felt something even worse. She felt her respect for Mike sliding away in huge masses, like earthslides after weeks of rain.

  She made me feel like doing all the things I wanted to do with you. But I had them totally, one hundred percent under control.

  Then how did you make such a mess of things, she wondered.

  Evan O'Brien, the CSI, had left one message on her work machine: He wanted to talk. Important.

  • • •

  Cheryl Davis was Patti Bailey's twin sister. She was fifty-five years old, brown and brown, pretty face and pretty heavy.

  "The problem with the cops," said Cheryl, "was they didn't realize Patti had changed."

  Merci asked how.

  "She wasn't riding with the Hessians anymore. That was the year before. She wasn't hanging with the drug people in Laguna because all they'd pay with was dope. She didn't want dope—she wanted money. That's why the detectives never got very far. They were asking the wrong people. She was in with a different clientele when she was killed."

  "Who?"

  "Higher class. Businessmen. Politicians."

  Merci considered. "That's quite a change."

  "Patti was ambitious. She was . . . Sergeant Rayborn, Patti was an absolute bullshitter, but sometimes the things she said were true, she told me she was servicing powerful men. The elite, the mover shakers. It made her feel important. No, she didn't give me names. She wasn't loose . . . that way. I wouldn't have recognized them anyway because I was living down in Key West then. That's a whole other story but we wrote back and forth a lot. She liked to write. So did I."

  Cheryl Davis sighed quietly and looked down at her hands. She was wearing a big knit sweater against the cold. The house was a tract home off of Tyler; built, Merci guessed, about the time Cheryl's sister was shot. Builders didn't bother much with insulation back then. There three cardboard boxes overflowing with Christmas decorations in the corner of the living room. Nothing up yet, Merci noted.

  "What was frustrating for me," Cheryl said, "was I might have helped. I had the letters. By the time I realized the police had interviewed the old crowd, it was a year later. I gave the detectives copies of them, but to be honest, I think they were onto other things by then. Her letters were always grandiose, and kind of vague anyway. Just like she was.”

  Merci looked at the woman. "I'm sorry about what happened, I feel bad for you."

  Hess would have liked that, she thought: feeling what someone was feeling, or at least trying to.

  Cheryl Davis wiped a tear with a tissue that had been balled in the pocket of her sweater. Prepared, thought Merci.

  "Give me something," Merci said. "Anything I can run with."

  "Okay."

  Cheryl got up and went out. A few minutes later she came back an old-fashioned briefcase, the ones with the expandable sides and multiple dividers that would just get fatter the more you put in it. A big handle. It was worn.

  "Oh," said the woman, catching Merci's eyes. "This was Dad's, I put all the stuff in here about the investigation. Thought it might bring me luck, you know. Anyway, you can borrow it."

  "Thank you."

  Cheryl Davis unlocked the flap and pulled it open. Then she shut it again and locked it. "No. I just can't go there again. Not now. Please take it."

  She set the case in front of Merci and remained standing. So Merci did, too. Interview over.

  "I'll give you something else. I gave it to Rymers and his partner but never heard anything more about it. Patti wrote me in one of those letters that's in there, she said she knew who beat up a farmer named Jesse Acuna. I guess he was a real family man, lots of kids and grandchildren, lots of friends. Did good things for people. It was a big mystery, who'd do such a thing to him. I didn't recognize his name back then, but I guess it was big news in Orange County—somebody beating up a farmer who'd never committed a crime in his life. He almost died. Anyway, Patti says in there she knew who did it. Said she had it 'documented.' That's the word she used. I'm not sure what she meant by that."

  "How'd she find out?"

  "I think he was, you know, one of her customers."

  Merci put Thornton's and Cheryl Davis's statements together and shook them up. "Was Patti servicing cops?"

  "She never said that, no."

  Merci wondered if the highway between the Hessians and the power brokers might have been cleared and paved by the law. There had to be connective tissue. Anything could happen. Just look at Mike.

  "I'll return this," said Merci, hefting the case. It was heavy.

  "I hope it helps you." Cheryl Davis was dabbing her cheek again as she walked Merci to her door. "You know what Patti was, Sergeant?"

  "Tell me."

  "She was bright and funny and cute. So loyal. She and I couldn't have taken more . . . different paths. But she loved me the whole way. No matter how far down she got. You know what one of her best features was, her prettiest parts? Her neck. It was slender and graceful, just beautiful. She'd wear necklaces just to show it off. I'll never forget this string of faux pearls she wore to the prom in high school. So ... elegant and so . . . humble. And for someone to do what he did is a sin. It's just a crime, it's a sin."

  "It's the ugliest sin there is, Ms. Davis."

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Colin Byrne, reference desk assistant for the UC Irvine Library, had everything ready for Merci when she got there. It was almost three o'clock. Byrne, whom she had talked to on the phone only an hour earlier, had set her up with a private study room in the archives section of the building.

  He was a lanky blond with innocent blue eyes and a necktie with pictures of hounds on it. His trousers were held up by suspenders with designs of magnifying glasses on them.

  "You caught me in my Doyle gear," he said when she noticed the magnifiers. "Glad I'm not wearing the bullet-hole tie. That's the hard-boiled look."


  "Not real bullet holes, I hope."

  "No. But it's nice to meet a real detective. I'd never ask, but I wonder if you're working the case of the murdered escort, down in San Clemente."

  "I'd never answer, but no, it's something else I'm after."

  He smiled. "You name it, you got it. Anything."

  He rolled out the chair for her, then tutored her through the search features on the computer. She could search by topic or specific name for any period of time from 1887—when the county's first newspaper went into regular publication—to the present. All county papers were contained in the program: the smallest and most temporary weeklies, college and junior college student papers, members' newsletters of yacht clubs, professional journals, the three major dailies that now circulated in Orange County. Even some of the corporate newsletters.

  "We're missing three months of the old Huntington Beach Watch.” said Byrne, "because they lost their archival copies in a fire. Same some early copies of the Newport Ensign, but that was flood. Other that, it's all here. You'll be amazed how fast you can get around the century of newspapers with this computer. It's usually best to go big-to-small. Let me know if you get stuck."

  "Patti Bailey" got her seventy-two hits in eight publications, most of them in the Los Angeles Times and the Santa Ana Register.

  Reading through the stories from the bigger papers, she didn't find anything she hadn't already learned from the case file. The Times printed a polite request for greater police action on the case, on the year anniversary of her death.

  The Tustin News had a feature story on the boy who had discovered the body. He'd been looking for lizards in the grove, thought Bailey asleep when he first spotted her. They ran a picture of him pointing the side of the culvert.

  They also had a police blotter notice of Bailey's arrest on charges almost a year before her death. It was only one line, mixed in with the car stereo rip-offs and drunken driving arrests: Patti Bailey of Santa Ana, was arrested by Orange County Sheriffs on suspicion of possession of barbiturates after being pulled over on 17th St. for erratic driving Wednesday night. . .

  After the murder they also ran a two-part investigative piece about prostitution out of the De Anza Hotel, which was up on Fourth Street, just out of the Tustin city limits. The article said that Patti Bailey was "known as a tenant," but was rarely seen at the De Anza. The reporter wrote:

  It is easy to picture this happy-go-lucky 23-year-old among the inebriated celebrants in the De Anza Lounge on a rowdy Friday night Here, the scent of illicit activity mixes with the perfume of tequila Beautiful women come and go, with eyes that are at once inviting and challenging.

  The accompanying photo spread showed the De Anza on a "fabled" night. The three pictures were from the newspaper's photo file, taken at a New Year's Eve party eight months before the murder: a hacienda-style room with a fountain and potted plants, a long bar staffed by Latin men in bow ties, plenty of drunk-looking men and young women in miniskirts. It was a big room with exposed ceiling timbers, a wrought-iron chandelier draped with paper streamers, the background fading to black around crowded tables of men and women.

  The hotel owner denied knowing of anything illegal transpiring on his property, so most of the information came from the prostitutes themselves. "Patti had very high-class friends," said "Blossom." "She came here mostly to eat and drink." The reporter confirmed that Bailey was a permanent resident of room number 245. He was not permitted to see it.

  The article went on to quote some enlisted men, regulars at the De Anza, who said they came for the atmosphere and cheap margaritas. High class, all right, Merci thought.

  Santa Ana Police Chief Ed Simpson called the place a "trouble spot," and said they could enforce the law there but they couldn't shut it down. City hall would have to do that. One week after Bailey's death, it did.

  A Tustin News editorial that ran four months after Bailey's murder contained an interesting nugget.

  Rumors of prostitution at the De Anza Hotel circulated widely long before it was shut down by the City of Santa Ana. Rumors of law-enforcement personnel frequenting the hotel circulated for almost as long. The News can only hope that there was no connection between the longevity of a house of sin and its alleged popularity with some elements within the law. Where police are involved in crime, no citizen can be safe. Perhaps the murder of Patti Bailey helped to illustrate this tragic truth.

  Merci rolled back in the wheeled chair, stretched her legs. What was wrong in '69? she thought. Cops beating up farmers, cops hanging with whores?

  She went back to the New Year's Eve photo of the De Anza and enlarged it to full-screen, half expecting to find someone she recognized at one of the tables.

  No luck.

  She hit the print command to make copies of it all.

  • • •

  The name Jesse Acuna got 238 newspaper hits in 1969, 135 the year after, and an even 50 the year after that. Last year, he'd still been referred to 16 times in the local press. He was ninety-five years old, living in San Juan Capistrano down in the southern part of the county.

  Merci remembered hearing about him in elementary school.

  She scanned the articles that came out immediately after the beating.

  Acuna was found unconscious and bleeding by his grandson, Charlie, at sunrise on the Fourth of July. Jesse Acuna had just come from chicken coop, collecting eggs as he'd done every morning for as long as anyone could remember. He was sixty-four. His grandson was seven

  Intensive care for a week. Hospital for a month. Left eye destroy Slurred speech for the rest of his life. Ninety stitches in his scalp face. Eight teeth knocked out. Two fingers crushed beyond meaningful repair.

  It pissed off Merci Rayborn immediately and immensely, what happened to this old man. To the boy, too. Merci wondered how Fourth of July picnic pictured on Sally Thornton's TV trays stacked against the Fourth of July surprise that Jesse Acuna and his grandson got.

  Two of the baseball bats used on Acuna were found at the scene. Footprints in the barnyard, tire tracks on the dirt road. Charlie saw three men get into the getaway truck—a light-colored pickup, no camper, big tires, went fast. Big men, he said, masks on. Charlie was scared mute three days before he could even speak.

  The farm was a hundred acres of rolling hills down in the south part of Orange County.

  Merci scanned through, filling in, connecting the story with memory of it: no arrests, no suspects.

  Five weeks after the beating, Acuna's story hit both the Times and the Register. He said that his one hundred acre orange grove—owned his family since the early 1800s—was located between two valuable parcels of land. The parcels were worth millions if the land was subdivided, developed and sold. But the parcels were worth "many, many millions more" if they could be connected by a major road through the hills that separated them. That land was his.

  He'd refused to sell it or grant a road easement through it, in spite of offers that were a hundred times what he'd make in a good year on his oranges.

  He'd been sued by two cities and the county itself, trying to stretch their powers of eminent domain—and he'd won all three suits in court.

  He'd had his land annexed by one city, which condemned the buildings for code violations committed at a time before codes; then seen his land annexed by another city that said he could stay right where he was.

  Then came the threats. First by some small-time real-estate hustlers who thought hired muscle and a fire in the machine shed would scare him off. Another who suggested Acuna's children—he had eleven— might come to harm on their way home from school someday. He'd had his brood driven to and from school by a couple of able-bodied farmhands for nearly two years.

  He'd had his trees poisoned with herbicide right before harvest; he'd had his wells poisoned right before Christmas; he'd had gunmen shoot out the windows of his home while he slept with his wife of thirty years, Teresa.

  Acuna said that none of that had really frightened him. It stren
gthened his resolve to stay. He said that farming was in his blood for generations, all the way back to the ranchos and before that. He said that oranges were all he knew; they had fed his parents and his children and his grandchildren and he saw no reason why they couldn't feed their children and grandchildren. Everybody ate. Everybody worked. His oranges were good.

  None of it frightened him until one hot spring morning that year, when two men drove up in a white Mercedes-Benz and told him they had a terrific offer for his land. He offered them fresh juice, which they drank in the shade of the courtyard. He listened carefully to their offer. Acuna said it was extravagantly large, but he was forced to say no for the usual reasons. He wouldn't disclose the figure to reporters, because it was "private." They told him there would be trouble if he didn't accept. He asked what kind. They wouldn't say. But Acuna told papers that he could tell from their faces that they meant what they said and he knew when they left that some calamity would soon befall him.

  Two months later, it did.

  When he could talk again, Acuna told reporters he had no intention of selling his farm: It would have been like selling his heart.

  Six months after Acuna had been beaten, the headlines were considerably smaller, the articles much farther back in the papers.

  The county re-annexed a large piece of south county ground when a fledgling city defaulted on services payments. Acuna's farm was part of it. The county then rezoned the whole one hundred acres R-l, residential. Acuna was shortly presented with deadlines for sewer construction and hookup. He was ordered to pay residential rates for municipal water, electricity and natural gas—an increase of roughly 500 percent. The land received a new tax assessment and Acuna got a staggering property tax increase—close to 700 percent. Farm subsidies and a cultural tax breaks no longer applied. He was ordered to pave all his roads, then apply for a conditional-use permit under the "existing, non-conforming" clause. Acuna did, and his petition was immediately denied by the County Board of Supervisors on January 14, 1970.