Roy Heiselden’s disappearance

Roy Heiselden’s disappearance turns an apparently ordinary Westwood-area home into an investigative puzzle: the house is locked and partly maintained, but Heiselden is absent and his mail is accumulating elsewhere. The evidence establishes that he has gone, not why, where he has gone, or whether his absence is connected to Eldon Mate’s murder. Milo Sturgis treats the disappearance as worth pursuing; the detectives assisting him remain uncertain that it bears on the case.

The house on Camden Avenue

Heiselden’s home stood on Camden Avenue, west of Westwood and south of Wilshire. It was a peach-colored, one-story house that seemed unremarkable from the street. Its lawn was mown, but there were no shrubs, the driveway was empty, and an alarm-company sign stood in the grass. The front door was secured with a dead bolt. When Milo Sturgis checked the mail slot, he saw only throwaway flyers and no mail, which led him to infer that Heiselden had left recently.

The rest of the property offered signs that did not settle the question of how long he had been gone. Behind the house, grass surrounded a small oval swimming pool set into a brick deck. The water was beginning to turn green, and algae spotted the gunite. Alex Delaware suggested that the pool’s condition could mean Heiselden had stopped using a pool service some time earlier, perhaps while arranging for his mail to be held. Milo replied that Steve Korn and Brad Demetri had already checked on that possibility and that the gardener had continued to come by. Thus the neglected pool suggested an absence, while the maintained lawn suggested that at least one routine service had not been canceled.

A secured but unoccupied property

The physical inspection added more absences without providing an explanation. The double garage was locked. Milo pried its door up several inches and saw no car, only an old bicycle, hoses, and ordinary stored items. Most of the windows were barred and bolted, and the back door had a dead bolt like the front. The kitchen window was uncovered but narrow and high; Milo lifted Alex so he could look through it. The house was difficult to inspect from outside, but nothing in these checks established that Heiselden was inside or accounted for his whereabouts.

Repeated visits produced the same result. Milo said that he, Korn, and Demetri had each gone to the house more than once; the door was always locked and no one answered. He proposed finding the landlord rather than continuing to spend time at the property. The lack of an answer was therefore not a single missed encounter, but neither did it amount to proof of what had happened to Heiselden. The investigation had to move beyond the house to the people and arrangements that might explain his absence.

Signs of an arranged absence

Follow-up inquiries complicated the first impression of abandonment. The gardener was still mowing the lawn, and Heiselden had not told him to stop. He had paid the gardener for the month, although the gardener did not know where Heiselden was and showed little concern about his absence. The utilities were also still on. Meanwhile, Heiselden’s mail was being held at the Westwood post office for general delivery. What first looked like an empty mailbox was not evidence that no mail existed: the mail was accumulating at the post office, where the detectives could not obtain it without a warrant.

When Korn asked whether Milo wanted them to seek a warrant, Milo said yes. He interpreted the mail stop as confirmation that Heiselden had deliberately left, describing him as having run off, and instructed the detectives to continue looking. The arrangement suggested planning, but the evidence did not reveal the destination, the duration, or the reason. A paid gardener and active utilities preserved some appearances of normal household management even as Heiselden’s diverted mail and inaccessible home made his absence increasingly conspicuous.

The search and its unresolved significance

Milo’s search for Heiselden was linked to a second line of inquiry: Donny Mate. When Alex asked whether he was concentrating on Heiselden or Donny, Milo refused to choose between them. He wanted to learn whether Donny had been released without conditions or placed on parole, and whether a parole officer could be contacted. He also considered whether Donny might be the homeless man seen by Mrs. Krohn, perhaps still spending time in Hollywood. That possibility could fit the idea that Donny had been stalking Mate, but it remained an investigative theory rather than an established fact.

Milo kept the possibility of Heiselden’s involvement open while acknowledging that it had not been demonstrated. Steve Korn and Brad Demetri, who had worked the neighborhood and spoken with the gardener, were not convinced Heiselden had anything to do with Mate. Their disagreement marks the disappearance’s importance: Heiselden is a person the investigation cannot locate, but his absence alone does not make him a suspect or explain the murder. Milo’s insistence on pursuing him preserves the lead without resolving its meaning, while the mail warrant and search for the landlord represent practical next steps where observation at the locked house had reached its limits.