Chapter 2

The reduced rate apartment was "tossed" by experts. It must have been the forensic people from the Hollywood police crime scene unit. At least that was Mike's assumption but it could have been from the girl's sister or some other intruder who might have been involved in the victim's unnatural departure. Most of the stuff was just cosmetic and he boxed up all of the girl's belongings into the empty booze boxes from the storeroom and assigned numbers on an inventory sheet just in case the girl's relatives decided they wanted her possessions for sentimental reasons. It was just the way they did it in the Army when one of the guys didn't come back from a patrol or a dangerous assignment.

He tried not to get too nosy when it came to cleaning out her undies drawers or organizing her many photos of the many scenes around Hollywood that attracted tourists and movie fans alike. He looked intently at the shots in one of those "four for a buck" instant photo booths of the two girls who looked almost like twin sisters. He was certain the younger one was the deceased former resident and the slightly older one was the sister from somewhere just outside of San Francisco. The apartment manager, Ma Barker had told him that the sister was a "cold fish" who had shown no emotions at all when she gave details to the police right in front of her. It looked like all of the written papers were carted off by the police as well as anything else of value or interest in the investigation.

The apartment manager also told him,

"The cops closed this case as "suspicious circumstances" within 48 hours of it being reported and don't have any plans of investigating a damn thing."

He was glad there were no bloodstains to contend with and that someone had removed all of the bed linens and towels long before he opened the sealed door. He had all of that stuff in the storage room anyway. All he had to do was give them a quick wash and dry in the laundry room using the roll of coins hidden in his duffel bag. He gave the walls without wallpaper a coat of paint to cover the years of grime and wiped the wallpaper down with a damp cloth lightly so as not to pull it away from the wall. Luckily, there was no carpeting in the unit and he only had to wash down the wood floor with a cleaning mixture and put a coat of wax on to keep the wood looking good.

The bathroom was pretty much all tiled and he got it clean without much difficulty. The shower curtain got replaced and he was a shower guy not a bath guy anyway. He looked at the petite sized tub and speculated that it must have been a hard job to get drowned in it unless you had a lot of help in getting the job done.

After he got the dearly departed Amy Lynch's things stored away, he started bringing in his stuff from the storeroom. He had to admit that he probably should have gotten rid of some of the things because they just got in the way and he just condensed them down into a couple of the boxes and returned them to the storage to keep them from making the rooms messy. His little radio still worked well and he was glad that hadn't thrown away his photos of the old neighborhood back east triggering a memory of happier days.

He knew from reading the newspaper clippings of the discovery of Amy Lynch's body that her closest living relative was her sister Lois Lynch from a place called Dale City just outside of the San Francisco city limits. She was looking a bit bedraggled in the flash photography in the local newspaper but it was only to be expected when one is going through the routine of identifying a body for forensic identification.

Once the place was straight, he headed back to the Blvd. to look for a likely place to set up his office. He was certain that this was the perfect place to put out a shingle of "Mike Malloy, Confidential Inquiries" instead of the much-maligned title of "Private Investigator". There were so many husbands checking up on wayward wives and Jealous wives desirous of getting the inside info on their cheating spouses, that he expected to be overwhelmed with clients willing to pay a few bucks to get all the juicy details.

He found the ideal spot almost immediately.

It was a little cubby-hole between a Union meeting hall and a flower shop that was formerly a shoeshine place that had fallen on hard times and shut down due to lack of customers. He had to yank out the platforms and the little booths for customers waiting for their shoes from repair or their trousers from being altered while they waited. It was an industry at the end of the line like the doormen and elevator operators no longer needed to ease life in the big city.

The married broad in the laundry room gave him the once-over while he took care of the dusty linens and towel from his earlier stay in the Los Angeles area. He had been a bottom of the heap script writer for the film industry that was churning out hundreds of grade "B" movies for the greedy fans across the lower 48. Of course, he never got credit for anything he did but he did get a fairly decent salary for doing it. His enlistment in the military was more of a rejection of lack of upward mobility than any patriotic urgings to serve his country.

"You sure got a lot of sheets and towels, Mister. I thought you just got here."

Mike had to laugh because it was an obvious inconsistency for his recent arrival in Hollywood. The woman was blunt enough to call a spade a spade and he liked that kind of honesty in perfect strangers. He noticed that her wash was mostly female clothing in two separate sets. One for her mature body and the other for a smaller female probably still in a pre-teen age. A set of waitress uniforms all bore the embroidered name of "Toni" and he surmised she was the Toni in question. He saw that her undies were generally matched and that sat well with his sense of order about such things. He wondered if she was wearing matched panties and bra on this laundry day and was tempted to ask her for a peek but thought better of it because he did not want to seem like a misogynistic pervert.

"I used to live here at the complex and I had my stuff in storage. It sure saved me a lot of money on buying new things. The landlady took care of my items for over three years."

She looked back at him over her shoulder knowing he was taking in the shape of her flanks through the thin summer dress.

"My name is Toni and I live here with my daughter Beth. My husband is listed as Missing in Action but my hopes are not too high because it has been close to two years now. Were you in the service?"