Page 14 of Pro Bono

Warren leaned so he could see into the window over her head, but he sensed that he had made her feel uncomfortable, so he stepped back about five feet, and half turned away.

The cop said nothing, but began to walk along the front of the house. When she came to the next window, she leaned close and peered inside, her hands framing her eyes, then moved on to the next one and did thesame. Warren was relieved, because her moves made it seem natural to lag one window behind and maintain his distance. He noticed that before she moved each time she looked down to stare at the ground for footprints or other evidence of problems.

Every angle he had seen of the living room and foyer looked neat and orderly—nothing out of place, no shade variations between parts of floors that could indicate wetness or staining, no places on walls that looked as though anything had been wiped or smudged.

When the cop reached the back steps of the house she went up to the door, rang the back doorbell once, waited, and then rang it again, knocked once, knocked harder, tried to turn the doorknob, but failed. She looked in the glass on the upper part of the door, but Warren was pretty sure that she couldn’t see much, maybe a part of the kitchen floor and a view of the rest of the room veiled by the gauzy curtain. When she came down, she continued her circuit of the house, and appeared to be giving every inch of the property the same intense scrutiny. She walked to the upper end of the driveway and looked in the row of windows at the top of the garage door. “No car,” she said, returned to the place where she had left off, and continued the rest of the way around to the front of the house.

As she walked past him, Warren pretended to take a picture of the house’s front porch, but timed it to take her nameplate, because he expected she would leave now and he might need to know that later. The plate said, “N. Porter.”

She surprised him by continuing across the front lawn to the house to the right of Vesper Ellis’s. She rang the doorbell and took a step back. A moment later an elderly man came to the door. He was tall and slim, with a slightly bent spine. Officer Porter said, “Good afternoon, sir. I’m here doing a welfare check on your neighbor, Mrs. Ellis.”

“Vesper?” the man said. “Has something happened to her?”

“It’s just that some friends of hers haven’t been able to reach her. Do you know when you last saw her?”

“I saw her rolling one of her empty trash bins up the driveway. You know the noise that makes. Trash pickup is Tuesday on this block, so it had to be Tuesday. I glanced out the window because you do that even though you recognize the sound and know what it must be. Or it could have been Wednesday, because sometimes if you come home after a long day at work and having dinner out and don’t feel like doing it you put it off until the next morning.”

“Yes, sir. And have you heard or seen anything from her house since then? Like music, or voices or a door slamming?”

“No. She’s a quiet neighbor. She and her husband used to do a lot of entertaining, but that ended when he died.”

“Thank you,” she said, took a notebook out of her pocket, asked for his name, wrote it down, then crossed the street and rang that doorbell and repeated nearly the same conversation with the younger woman who answered that door. Next she went to the house to the left of Vesper Ellis’s house, but nobody answered that doorbell or the knocking. She looked at the Ellis house again, this time staying as far from the siding as possible, and craned her neck to stare up at the windows. She walked the whole perimeter, stopping every few feet to look down at the ground and along the fences, then up at the next second-floor window.

When they reached the street again Officer Porter said, “I’m sorry. That’s about as far as we can go. No response, no car in the garage, nothing broken or obviously tampered with, no scrapes like a door was jimmied, no broken windows, no tracks or paint chips or anything near the windows, not even any scrapes on the fences as though somebodyhad climbed over. The neighbors haven’t seen or heard anything. Mrs. Ellis is an adult, so if she wanted to leave, she had every right.”

Warren said, “I know. We have to assume that’s what happened. But I have a bad feeling about this.”

The cop looked around her as though to be sure nobody was going to hear. “So do I. But the world has gotten sick of cops who had an unsupported suspicion and acted on it. We’ve got nothing to hang it on.”

“I know. But she came to me with evidence that some of her investment accounts are being drained. It’s pretty unusual for a client to come to me with good reason to believe she’s being robbed, and then disappear and stop answering her phone, even when her closest friends call her. And meanwhile I had two men follow me on my way home and shoot at me. It’s unusual to have people shoot at me.”

“I’m sure it is,” Officer Porter said. “You’ve got a detective assigned to your case, right?”

“Yes. Sergeant McHargue.”

“Must be another station. You can ask him to apply for a warrant and take a look inside. You know that, right?”

“Sure. I may give that a try, but I don’t think I’ve got anything that a judge would call probable cause. About all I can do right now is report her missing.”

“I think that’s the right thing to do. But don’t call the Missing Persons Unit. Go in person to the West Valley Station at 19020 Vanowen. It will help that they can see you’re not a lunatic or a creep.”

“You’re sure they’ll see that?”

“Reasonably sure.” She didn’t smile. They could hear a call coming in over her car’s radio. “Sorry we didn’t find anything here. I’ve got to go take one of these calls.” She got into her patrol car, pulled away from the curb, and drove off.

Warren watched her car turn and disappear, and then went back along the side of the house. One of the reasons he had tagged along on her search was so the neighbors would see him with her, a uniformed cop. Given unconscious sexism, people had probably assumed the man in the suit was the female uniformed patrol officer’s superior.

The welfare check had not settled anything in his mind. Even though Mrs. Ellis’s car was gone, that didn’t mean she’d taken it. She had seemed eager for his phone call, but she wasn’t answering her phones. Her house was locked, but the alarm wasn’t turned on. At least that observation gave him something he could use. He cut across the back lawn to the trunk of a big tree beside the roof over the back porch, jumped to grasp the lowest branch, pulled himself up, reached for the branch above him, pulled himself up onto it, crawled a few feet on the limb to get above the roof, and stepped down onto the shingled surface. He stood and walked toward the place where the porch’s roof met the side of the house.

Some people in Los Angeles cooled their houses before the summer got too hot by opening upper windows. Sometimes when they closed the windows later, they could be lackadaisical about fastening the latches. Why worry? Nobody on the ground could see whether an upper window latch was open.

He reached the first set of windows. There were screens on them, so it was possible they were sometimes opened. He came close to the first one and saw the latch was locked. He moved to the second one, and that was locked too. He went to each window and leaned close with his eyes shaded and studied the inside of the house, half expecting to see the body of Vesper Ellis on the floor or on one of the beds. He saw nothing but expertly made beds and floors that shone with polishing. He paused. Maybe this was a foolish idea. Vesper Ellis had not seemed to be a person who would leave an unlocked window in her house.

The fourth window was different. When he looked closely, he could see that the latch was turned in the opposite direction from the others. He could hardly believe it. He reached into his pocket, took out his pocketknife, and opened the blade. He inserted it into the narrow space between the screen and the sill and pried the aluminum frame of the screen up very slightly, pried the hook out of the eye with the blade, pulled the bottom of the screen outward, slid it out of the guides that held the sides near the top, and set it down. Then he pushed the glass window upward with his thumbs until he could fit his fingers under it and slide the sash all the way up. He climbed in, slid the screen back into its guides, and hooked it in place, then closed the window.

Warren listened. He was aware that he had just committed the crime of breaking and entering, and that was enough to get him disbarred and possibly jailed, but he didn’t want to devote any time to thinking about that now.

He took a step deeper into the room. He knew that this was Vesper Ellis’s bedroom. The room was larger than the other bedrooms he’d seen from outside, and the bed was a California King rather than a double. The bed was made, with fresh sheets and the blanket pulled tight. There was no way to be sure if it had been done by Mrs. Ellis or by someone else to make it look as though all was well, but it was clear that she had not slept here the night after the bed had been made. He looked in the slightly open sliding door of the closet, and saw nothing but women’s clothes. None of them was the dress she’d worn to his office.

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