Swift Horses Racing

by Victoria Kazarian

  Ruiz felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. The screen on the dashboard picked up the call and asked if he wanted to answer or ignore it. It was Sergeant Frank Descortes again. The sergeant was rounding up people to watch the Niners game at his new, post-divorce apartment in Milpitas Monday night. Ruiz had done this a couple weeks ago, and the group that gathered had seemed cold and uncomfortable in Frank’s bare bones apartment. Vacant stares all around as the group tried to make the best of it, watching a game that wasn’t going well for the home team. Frank, who’d drunk a few too many beers, seemed scared that people were going to leave him by himself.

  Ruiz tapped a button on his steering wheel to ignore the call.

  He gave the department’s new Bluetooth-equipped cars a thumbs up. He’d skip the game and touch base with Frank later.

  As of last June, Ruiz had worked for Monte Verde Police Department for sixteen years. The small, wealthy community in the south peninsula was very different from the East San Jose neighborhood he’d grown up in, and it had taken him a good year to feel like he belonged there. The custom homes in the hills were owned by young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, tech company upper management, and older wealthy families who’d moved here before the tech boom.

  Ruiz had started on patrol and after five years decided to try out Investigations. In contrast to San Jose, Monte Verde was small—not considered a high crime community. Burglary, domestic cases, noise complaints, neighborhood disputes and drug busts at the local high school. Murders were rare. When they did happen, they usually involved money and family and were as cold blooded as any in his old neighborhood in San Jose.

  From the passenger seat, Grasso was watching him with small, black eyes. Her face and tiny nose gave her the look of an alert chihuahua. She wanted to ask him something. He suspected it was something he didn’t want to talk about.

  “I heard you tell the captain something happened the other night. On New Year’s.”

  Dani Grasso was a year out of the academy, first-generation police, the granddaughter of an Italian-born grocer who had turned his produce stand into a chain of high-end grocery stores in the valley. She had an expensive condo in Cupertino near Apple headquarters, a gift from grandpa. She seemed comfortable right away in upscale Monte Verde. When Ruiz had remarked on how well she was fitting into the community, the captain had laughed and said Grasso had “found her people.”

  Ruiz drove into the lot behind the station and pulled into a slot near the back door. He turned off the engine.

  “Reyna and I saw a shooting on our way back from a party.”

  Grasso brightened like a student realizing she knew the answer to the teacher’s question. “An old man. Really old. He used to work at NASA.”

  Ruiz sat back, his hand on the wheel. Since that night, he’d felt a heavy sense weighing on him that he’d missed something important. That he should have done something to stop this from happening. He’d be damned if he knew what that something was.

  “I saw his picture in the San Jose Mercury News. Such a tiny guy,” Grasso said. “He looked too old to be driving.”

  “It looked like a gang hit. The kind of thing that happened in my part of town growing up. The SUV passed us and shot into the old guy’s car right after he’d turned onto the expressway.”

  “He spent his life helping people.” Grasso’s eyes flashed in anger. “Why the hell would someone kill a guy like that?”

  Ruiz tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “Could have been something he did. Maybe something he didn’t even realize he did. Or the killers could have had some liquor in them and gone out with the intention to kill somebody.”

  He thought of some of the guys he’d met at the New Year’s party with Reyna. He’d seen glimpses of it that night. The amped up sense of competition. The tendency to be offended by something you’d normally brush off—like being cut off on an expressway. It didn’t take much. He’d seen his own father get violent when he drank. Ruiz had avoided alcohol for years, worried that he was destined to do the same thing.

  “The thing that discounts the drinking theory is, this person was a very good shot.” Ruiz described the shots, in the left side of Schuler’s head, in his chest. “From a moving car.”

  “But it is possible,” Grasso said, almost under her breath, as if she’d started crunching the numbers herself.

  Grasso hadn’t seen a murder in Monte Verde yet. She was pulling pieces from what she’d learned at the academy, a year of field training and—he knew this about her—a desire to see justice done.

  “He was targeted, and they planned it carefully.” Grasso was trying to put herself in the killer’s place. “He lived nearby, right? Someone called him so he’d leave his house. Then they waited.”

  “But why was he targeted?” Ruiz rested an arm on the top of the steering wheel. “I’ve been reading about him. He was a saint. He spent most of his time teaching kids science. In his spare time, he delivered meals to senior citizens.”

  “There must have been something. Something that made the shooter pick him.”

  The car grew dark as the sun started its descent behind the coastal hills. The timed lights turned on in the back lot. Ruiz opened his door.

  “Sometimes it doesn’t make any sense. You want to find the reason behind it—solve the case like a puzzle. But people kill for stupid reasons. The longer you do this, you see that people kill because they’re dumb, drunk, high, greedy or just plain evil. Or so twisted by something that’s happened to them that they couldn’t control themselves.”

  They walked in through the back entrance, past the break room.

  Grasso grabbed her bag from her locker. “You can let SJPD deal with it. You told them what you saw—it’s probably more than they’d get from a civilian witness.”

  He didn’t feel like telling Grasso that he hadn’t gotten the license plate number, which delayed the search for the SUV. He also didn’t want to tell her how much he’d thought about the shooting in the past twenty-four hours. Or that he’d heard the old man’s last words. It hadn’t been the first time he’d been present when someone died, but that moment with the old man had felt—he could only think of this word—sacred. Like Schuler was a man confessing to his priest.

  That moment weighed on him. Along with his own failure to do whatever his conscience thought he should have done to stop the shooting.

  He had told Flores at the scene that night. But he hadn’t told Reyna.

  He had decided it might be right to share it with the man’s next of kin.

  Tomorrow he would call Rose Schuler Mulvaney.

  8

  Duke sat down at the computer he’d set up on a table in the bedroom.

  He turned it on and watched as the screen ran through the Windows bootup sequence. Joanne would have hated that he’d set up the computer in the bedroom. She used to say that was the one place where she had him to herself.

  The week after she’d died in her sleep, he’d set up a workplace on the wall opposite the bed, a desk with his computer and his reference books lined up in a bookcase. After Joanne’s death and all the work he’d put in to take care of her, he’d gone back to what he knew. The world of specs, of speeds and altitude. It had been more than ten years, but he felt a part of that world again. Even if it was busy work he made for himself.

  Today he was here for research of a different kind. He entered “Karl Gerhardt Schuler” in the Google search box and hit return. He received the results he thought he’d get—a brief article in the San Jose Mercury News about the shooting, along with a list of Karl’s achievements in aeronautics, his inventions and patents. Photos of him receiving an award. Of him on the deck of an aircraft carrier, hand resting on a fuselage. Karl had been as self-effacing as they come, never wanting to talk about his accomplishments, more comfortable with giving credit to his team or to his company. Though from their conversations, Duke had always been impressed by Karl’s overall knowledge and decades of experience. The man’s memory alone
was impressive.

  The scariest thing about Joanne’s dementia had been the gaps in her memory—they opened up unexpectedly like sinkholes. One day it was the children. Then it was their wedding. Then finally, the day he had to explain to Joanne who he was.

  Karl’s mind was a precision machine. He could recall a foot race from his childhood in the Harz mountains in Germany as well as a detail of a wing assembly on a plane he’d worked on forty years ago. Duke found this a relief.

  Karl’s daughter Rose was more involved in Karl’s life than the rest of his family. Karl said she sometimes brought meals over and offered to clean. It had been a few years since he’d seen Rose. Duke decided to look her up, to find out what the plans might be for his memorial.

  Duke had seen many of his friends die over the years. He held things loosely now. If somebody didn’t show up to an outing or get-together, there was a good chance they were ill. The probability of cancer, heart disease or life-changing falls increased with time.

  But there was something different about Karl’s death. He was ninety-two, and as far as Duke could see, there was nothing wrong with his mind or his body. Or his relationships with family, friends and the people he went out of his way to help.

  Duke turned the situation over and over in his head, looking at it from different perspectives, as if it were a scale model of a plane in his hands.

  Karl’s death did not make sense.

  A thrust of wind rustled through the eucalyptus trees, sending leaves fluttering down. Ruiz pulled the car onto the shoulder, which was muddy from the rains and littered with grey-green leaves and curling strips of bark brought down by the wind.

  He parked and stepped out of the truck. The wind felt strong, yet it wasn’t raining. He looked around at the site, which was hard to recognize as the scene of the accident. Everything looked different in the light. That night everything had seemed focused, like he’d been in a tunnel—he’d seen the SUV, the old man’s white car, and the police cruiser, highlighted on the shoulder in the yellow glow of the streetlights. Daylight transformed and expanded the scene: now he could see the lurching row of trees, the backs of the houses beyond the concrete retaining wall.

  The hills in the distance were now bright and green from the rain, a bank of grey clouds piled up over them. Weather reports had been talking about the great storm coming, the atmospheric river that would descend over Northern California in the coming week. From the looks of the clouds today, it was on its way.

  He tried to remember which tree Karl Schuler’s car had hit. He walked along the shoulder, strewn with eucalyptus leaves, as he eyeballed each tree. The skin on each tree looked smooth, with bark peeled back like brown shipping wrap. He placed his hand flat on one and felt its cool smoothness. Tree after tree seemed the same, little to differentiate them. Maybe the darkness had confused him; it didn’t look like anything had happened along this stretch, beyond some quick fast food dining, to judge by the scattered bags and drink cups.

  After passing five or six of the large trees, he saw it. The torn-up shoulder should have made it obvious, as well as the skid marks in the lane by the shoulder. Car tracks in the mud, crumbles of car window glass, a curved piece of silver headlight casing. He looked up and saw the side of the tree, a bright gash in its bark.

  If the old man had been latino, there would be a descanso here, a cross bearing his name, decorated elaborately with plastic flowers and rocks. A memorial that his soul had departed from his body in this place.

  Ruiz walked around the tree, tracing the scars from the damage he’d seen that night. He looked over the skid marks from the SUV in the left lane. He followed the arc the white car had taken from the lane over to the tree.

  Ruiz asked himself why he was here. Flores was young, but he seemed capable enough. He wondered if he should give the guy a call. He wouldn’t be happy if someone moved in on one of his investigations. But then he’d heard the shots into the old man’s car and watched him die. Flores hadn’t.

  Maybe Grasso had been right—someone had called Karl Schuler out that night. The thought wedged in his head like a splinter. Of course, this was an unusually independent ninety-two-year old. Maybe he’d been going to one of his children’s houses. Maybe he’d been out of toothpaste or Depends or something and was making an emergency run to the store.

  He thought about touching base with Flores to check in. Flores had interviewed the family by this point. There had to be a way he could finesse this to find out how the case was progressing.

  As cars whizzed past on the expressway, he began the walk back to his car, avoiding the puddles and ruts of soft mud. He was looking down when he heard the crunch of car tires on gravel, pulling onto the narrow shoulder about twenty feet ahead of him.

  A grey Ford Taurus had parked ahead, not far behind his car. He wondered if it was someone needing help or someone lost, pulling over for a quick check on Google Maps.

  The door opened and an elderly man, thin and slightly stooped, stepped out of his car. Ruiz felt suddenly worried for him, on the narrow shoulder so close to traffic. The wind ruffled his stark white hair. He stood up and looked around tentatively. He wore a faded navy-blue windbreaker that looked about fifty years old.

  Ruiz approached the car and saw the man’s expression. He looked in pain—his face tightened and hard.

  He called out to the man. “Need some help?”

  The man waved a hand dismissively and shook his head. As he approached the man’s car, Ruiz saw his pale, freckled skin and round light-blue eyes magnified behind gold wire rim aviator glasses. “A friend of mine died here on New Year’s. I was passing by. I—I guess I needed to see it for myself.”

  “Karl Schuler.” Ruiz nodded. “That’s why I’m here. My wife and I saw it happen.”

  The old man’s lips trembled. It looked like the man was trying hard to keep his face immovable as granite. His generation had been taught that.

  Not much different than the guys Ruiz had grown up with. Break and you’re weak.

  “Duke Sorenson,” the man reached his hand out to Ruiz. The firm grip of his handshake surprised Ruiz. It didn’t match the man’s appearance.

  “Detective James Ruiz.”

  “Officer, I’d sure appreciate if you could tell me what you saw.”

  9

  Duke Sorensen faced him in the booth at the donut shop, his pale eyes intense behind his glasses.

  The shop smelled like sugar and hot fat. Ruiz’s stomach began rumbling.

  The morning crowd was long gone in the nearly empty shop and the donuts in the display case looked sparse and worse for wear. The Korean owner was scrubbing the tables around them fiercely, spreading an overpowering scent of lemon surface cleaner.

  “Karl and the gang, we met here at Kang’s shop. Every Friday morning at nine.” Duke looked around the small shop. “Then Joe passed on, and Chuck became a caregiver to his wife until she died. Karl and the rest of us tried to keep things going.”

  Since his own mother hadn’t had the privilege of living past the age of fifty-six and he hadn’t seen his father in twenty-five years, Ruiz had only seen the aging process up close when he visited his abuela in Salinas. He certainly didn’t look forward to it for himself. He’d investigated enough elder abuse cases in Monte Verde to dread that frailty and vulnerability. He fantasized that he’d die in a shootout before he had to face that, though the possibility of that happening was pretty slim in Monte Verde.

  “Detective Ruiz.” The man’s eyes were riveted on him solemnly. “I want you to tell me exactly what the person in the SUV did, what happened to the car, and what you saw when you looked into Karl’s car.”

  Ruiz thought about what he’d say. Duke was a smart guy, and he judged, had a strong streak of pride. He’d be respectful to Karl in telling the story, but he wouldn’t soften it either.

  “I was in Vietnam, Detective Ruiz,” the man said, his magnified eyes still that bleary, angelic blue. “You can tell me the truth.”

>   Ruiz told him about the sequence of events, then the shots into Karl’s window. He described Karl’s body as he saw it in clinical terms, to explain how severe his injuries had been without painting too vivid of a picture.

  “The good news is, he probably didn’t suffer.” Ruiz hoped his words were accurate. “He couldn’t have seen the SUV or the shots coming. There’s nothing he could have done to avoid this.”

  Duke took it in, his eyes as wide and round as an inquisitive baby’s. He looked from Ruiz’s face down to his coffee. He ran his boney, spotted hands slowly back and forth across the table’s Formica surface as if he were treading water.

  “Thanks for being straight with me.”

  Ruiz shook a packet of powdered creamer into his cup. This was not the organic creamer of the MVPD. Clumps floated on the surface till he stirred them in. “Duke, can you think of any reason why Karl would be out that late on New Year’s?”

  Duke shook his head. “Karl did what he wanted to do. I would say that he might have been out at a party, but he couldn’t stay awake past nine.” A faint smile crossed Duke’s face. “With Karl, the spirit was willing to do almost anything, but the flesh was weak.”

  The reference took Ruiz back to his church days growing up: Jesus in the Garden of Gesthemane, lecturing his disciples for not being able to stay awake as he wrestled with the prospect of his coming death.

  “What could be so important that he would have woken up and gone out?”

  “Off the top of my head, I’d say, it had to be an emergency with Rose or his grandkids. They live close by.” Duke took a bite of his maple bar. “Or with one of the students he worked with.”

  Flores must have interviewed the family by now. Maybe he’d found out if someone had called Karl Schuler. If it hadn’t been family or a student, maybe Grasso had been right—someone had called the old man out of his house that night with the intent to kill him.