by Matt Coyle
Baxter’s and Powell’s heads each turned toward the other. They were convinced I couldn’t see. I maintained my posture; my head remained pointed between them.
Powell’s head turned back to face me.
“My uncle’s dead. He died in an automobile accident over twenty years ago.”
“What happened to the money? Did he leave some to you? Shay didn’t get any.”
My phone silently vibrated a text in my pocket. I prayed it didn’t interfere with the audio recording app.
“For all I know, he spent it all.” Powell sounded relieved. Like he thought I only knew the story that had lived for twenty-plus years, not the truth that he and Benson had been hiding all that time. “The last time I saw my uncle was twenty-five years ago before he vanished with June Sommers’ money.”
“That’s not true. You saw him one more time. When you identified his body in Mexico after the car crash.”
“The last time I saw him alive.” Unfazed.
“Well, I’m not sure why you wanted to include me in this little chat, Mr. Cahill, but it’s time for me to get some rest.” Baxter, still cordial. Untouched, in his mind. “Keenan can lead you back down to the lobby.”
He and Powell stood up. I stayed seated, and not just to maintain the myth of my total blindness.
“Here’s where you come in, Chuck.” I fought the urge to turn and look directly at Baxter.
“Shay figured out that Colt Benson never died in a car crash. He used his nephew Keenan Powell to identify the body and ole Colt lived on under a different name. Something like Chuck Baxter. She even saw him with his wife one night while she was working at Muldoon’s Steak House and called him a fucking coward.”
Baxter and Powell sat back down but didn’t say a word.
“She figured out that Chuck went back to Colt’s stock market roots and started a hedge fund, relying on his clean biography to wrangle investors. I don’t know much about hedge funds, but I know that prudent investors do their homework on the fund managers before they decide to invest huge sums of money with them. A good reputation is paramount to your success, isn’t it, Chuck?”
“Of course.” Nonplussed. “But the rest of what you said is nonsense.”
I hadn’t struck a nerve yet. I would soon.
“I guess she didn’t press matters until she found out she was pregnant and wanted to give the life she was cheated out of to her baby.” I turned my head a hair in Benson’s direction. “Did Shay give you an ultimatum, Colt, oh, I mean, Chuck? Give her what was rightfully hers or she’d go to the press or your investors? Maybe even go to the police? Although the statute of limitations has already lapsed on the money you stole, there are no limitations on murder.”
A confirming silence that I didn’t need. Finally, Colt Benson spoke.
“You have quite an imagination, Mr. Cahill.” Under control, but some of the coolness had evaporated. “You made some libelous accusations in your fabricated story.”
“So, sue me. Let’s go to court.”
“I don’t think that’s what you really want, is it?”
“Why don’t you tell me what I really want?”
“Money.”
Jackpot. Consciousness of guilt. I was getting close enough for Detective Sheets to at least be interested. I hoped.
“Keep talking.”
“You came here under the auspices of speaking for Shay’s family, so I won’t consider this a shakedown from a blind sleazeball private dick.” The cool now all gone, replaced by a hard edge. “While none of what you just said is true, to refute it publicly could do harm to my reputation. So, on behalf of the Sommers’ family, I’d be willing to give them a gift to help them deal with their grief.”
“What kind of gift are you talking about?” I asked, waiting to hear the trap snap shut.
“Something with six figures. I’m assuming you would be responsible for delivering this gift.”
“Of course.”
“Keenan will contact you soon with the particulars.”
“How soon?”
“In the next couple days.” He stood up again. “Now get out.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
POWELL SILENTLY ESCORTED me all the way down to the lobby and out of the hotel to the sidewalk. I kept my eyes on his hands the whole time. Once on the sidewalk, his footsteps moved away behind me. I lost their sound and couldn’t tell if he’d gone back into the hotel or just taken a few steps and stopped.
I didn’t turn to look. Instead, I opened my phone to stop recording and to contact Uber, but remembered the text notification I’d gotten while I was up in the Sky Suite. I found my earbuds, plugged them into my phone, and listened to the text. I didn’t want Powell to hear if he was close enough.
The text was from Kris Collins. She wanted me to call her. I started walking north on Prospect toward Muldoon’s. I’d face-to-face her instead of calling. Footsteps behind me. Multiple. Voices from people out on Restaurant Row on the crisp winter night. I couldn’t discern if any of the footsteps belonged to Keenan Powell. I stopped and turned toward La Valencia. If Powell was still on the street, he wasn’t close enough for me to see him. Or close enough to hear me.
I called LJPD and asked for Detective Sheets. He was off until Monday, but I asked that he be given a message to call me ASAP.
I called Moira next.
“Now what?” A greeting I’d gotten used to.
“Make sure your home alarm system is armed tonight and that you are, too.”
“What the hell did you do?” A high rattle.
“Talked to Colt Benson and Keenan Powell.”
“Why the hell did you do that?” A sizzle.
“I wanted to try to get something incriminating on tape.”
“You taped them?”
“Yeah. Made them think I was shaking them down. Got maybe enough to get Detective Sheets to take an interest.”
“Are you insane?” A screech. “If they really are behind Shay’s murder, you just put a target on your back!”
“They’re going to contact me to set up a payoff. That’s when they’ll make their move. Of course, I won’t show up. I’ll take what I have to Sheets and see what he thinks.”
“This is ridiculous! Shay Sommers was murdered in her sleep. They didn’t wait for some stupid rendezvous site. You don’t even have an alarm system on your house.” Despite her continued insistence that I should get one. A precaution I never took while I was still in the game and an expense I thought I no longer needed after I quit playing. Except, now I was back in the game.
“I have an early alarm system. Eighty-five pounds of ears, muscle, and teeth.”
“Where are you now?”
“About to go into Muldoon’s to talk to Kris, then head home.”
“Stay there. I’m in Mission Valley, but I can be there in a half hour.”
“You don’t have to do that.
“Shut up. You’re staying with me until you talk to Detective Sheets. We’ll pick up Midnight on the way over. And we’re going to LJPD first thing in the morning.”
“Okay, boss.” Arguing would be fruitless. And staying with someone who could see and knew how to use a gun seemed like a good idea until I talked to Sheets.
I made it to the restaurant without incident. I was careful going down the stairs even though now I could almost make them out. Different levels of blur. Gravel-throated vocals backed by a gritty guitar riff assaulted me when I entered Muldoon’s. My favorite kind of assault. Saturday was blues night in the bar at Muldoon’s. I tapped down the hall to the hostess stand.
“Rick?” Kris. “You didn’t have to come down here. We’re swamped, but I would have called you back later. We have a party of twenty drunk women for a bachelorette party and a waiter called in sick, so I’ve been waiting tables and helping out a new hostess. I’m in the weeds, but will be free in a bit. I hope. You want dinner? It’s on me?”
“No thanks. I’ll wait in the bar.”
“Let me fi
nd you a seat.” She stepped in front of me and offered her arm. “I’m right in front of you.”
“You’re busy. I’ll manage. Thanks.”
“Come on.” She grabbed my left hand and guided it to her right bicep. I let her lead even though I didn’t need such hands-on help anymore.
We went into the bar. Mississippi blues bouncing off the walls led by the voice and guitar of Bob McKee, a San Diego blues legend. Short, squat with stubby fingers that pulled regrets out of your soul and ran them down guitar strings. A voice to match and a kick-ass five-piece band.
Kris sat me at a table against the wall to the right of the bar entrance.
“Would you like a beer? Ballast Point IPA?”
Kris still remembered my beer.
“No thanks.” Beer went well with the blues but not for a blind man with a target on his back. “I’m good.”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Kris hustled out of the bar.
I settled in and listened to the music. Tried to get lost in it, but couldn’t help but think of Turk as I sat in his bar in the restaurant where we first became friends and where, a dozen years later, he gave me a second chance at life. The music drifted into the background.
Memories flooded my brain of Turk showing me the restaurant ropes and convincing his father I deserved a raise after only a month working there. He knew my dad couldn’t hold a job anymore and that my family could barely pay our bills. His father told me that Turk told him I’d earned the raise, but Turk never mentioned it to me. Eleven years later, he drove up to Santa Barbara to visit me in jail when everyone else believed I was guilty. A year after that, he gave me a job at Muldoon’s knowing it would hurt business.
Now he was locked in a cage for a crime he didn’t commit. Just like I’d been. I had to get him out.
The music had stopped. The lights were halfway up. The band was on a break. People moved past me to the bar exit. On the way to the bathrooms or outside for fresh air before Bob McKee and his band started their next set. A mass of fragrances, scents, and smells wafted by. Women’s perfume, men’s cologne, men’s deodorant all commingling with human pheromones to give off similar, yet distinct smells. But no Dove deodorant.
A shadow appeared in front of me. Kris. She sat across from me.
“I’m worried about Turk.” Her body slumped into the table. “He won’t let me visit him in jail. He called me this morning to check up on the restaurant. He sounded awful. Like he’s beaten. Like he’s given up. Have you seen him?”
“Yeah. He’s hanging in there.” What else could I say? Kris was carrying the load of the entire restaurant, worrying about Turk, and grieving over the loss of her best friend. Why add to the grief with the truth. “How are you? Have you had a day off since he was arrested?”
“No, but Pat gets back from Europe in five days. I’m fine.”
Her voice put a lie to her words. She was worn out.
“You need to take a few days off. Teach your best server how to close. You need a break.”
“I’m okay. I owe it to Turk to make sure his restaurant is running smoothly when he’s not here. I owe it to everyone who works here.” A head shake. “Anyway, how’s the preparation for the trial going? You’re a part of the defense team, right?”
“Things are going well. Ellis Fenton is a good lawyer.” I didn’t tell her I’d been cut from the team. I was my own team.
“I feel so helpless with him sitting in jail. Is there anything I can do to help?”
“You’re doing it by keeping the restaurant open and running.”
“I started a GoFundMe page to try to raise money for bail.” No optimism in her voice.
“Great idea.”
“Well, we’ve only raised a few hundred dollars and some of the comments have been so vile that I had to turn off the comment function.”
“The blessing and the curse of social media.”
“Well, I’d better go tend to the drunk girls.” She got up, but leaned toward me instead of exiting the bar. Spicy citrus fragrance mixed with feminine perspiration. Lips on my cheek. Then she was gone, her scent evaporating behind her.
People started to drift back into the bar. That’s when I smelled it. A singular scent. One I’d smelled before. Three times. In one twenty-four-hour period. Men’s Dove deodorant mixed with male musk. I snapped my head to the odor. A male form sat at a table across the entrance from me. Eight feet away. His head angled in my direction. A hand on his hip, elbow angled out. That’s where he made his mistake. His underarm was exposed, leaking out his own unique stink.
The Invisible Man.
CHAPTER FIFTY
THE INVISIBLE MAN. He existed. And was within eight feet of me. Or was it an innocent civilian wearing the wrong deodorant like the old man at La Sala three days ago?
No. It was him. The mixture with the distinct musk whose absence I overlooked at La Sala. I knew it in my gut. I knew it in my heart. The person across from me was the Invisible Man.
Powell and Benson’s assassin.
I turned my head toward the stage, but still watched the man through the corner of my sunglasses. He was a blur. I couldn’t see his eyes, but his head was angled in my direction.
He’d followed me to Muldoon’s from La Valencia. Just like he followed Moira and me when we met Turk. He was there later that night when Moira followed Shay to La Valencia. But how did he know to follow us to Turk’s that morning? Only one way. A bug. Turk’s girlfriend was making trouble for Powell and Benson. They were worried that she’d tell him what she knew. The Invisible Man must have bugged Shay’s apartment and Turk’s office or home. The bug picked up his phone conversations with Moira, and they found out that Turk hired her to tail Shay.
Had he bugged my house, too? The night I walked Midnight down Moraga Avenue. The person Midnight growled at coming from the direction of my house. The Invisible Man? Did he have time to get inside, plant a bug, and get out again? It didn’t matter now. The assassin was eight feet away from me.
He’d tailed Moira and me the night of Shay’s Maybach ride by the ocean when she overplayed her hand with Colt Benson in the Sky Suite of La Valencia. Maybe he staked out Shay’s house while we were there and later saw Turk show up and the lights go on. He heard them arguing and waited for Turk to leave, for the lights to go out and enough time for Shay to fall back asleep, then he picked the lock and broke in. Incapacitated Shay with a punch to the face that fractured her eye socket, then used Turk’s tie to strangle her. Maybe he saw the tie after he knocked her out or, earlier, when he bugged her apartment days or weeks before. Either way, Shay’s dead and Turk’s a patsy.
I might have been wrong about how everything went down, but one thing I was sure of. The Invisible Man worked for Powell and Benson.
And he murdered Shay Sommers.
And that very moment, there was nothing I could do about it. At least not until Detective Sheets listened to the audiotape of Baxter willing to pay me off. Until then, the police already had their man in jail.
I needed help and I couldn’t get it from LJPD, yet. If they showed up now without the ability to arrest him, the Invisible Man would be in the wind and maybe lost forever.
But help was already on the way. Moira.
The band returned, so did customers, and the lights went down low. I kept my blurred vision on the Invisible Man through my sunglasses and the darkened bar.
Two minutes into my vigil, he got up from his table and left the bar.
Shit.
I didn’t know what to do. Was he leaving the restaurant or just going to use the restroom? Or going somewhere quiet to call his masters, Benson and Powell? If so, he’d be back in a few minutes and Moira would probably arrive by then.
Or was this a ploy to get me to follow him so he could get me isolated for the kill? Couldn’t be. He and his bosses thought I was blind. How would I even know he was there to follow?
It wasn’t a trap and he was getting away. The connection to Powell and Benson. If
I lost him and he disappeared forever, Turk might spend the rest of his life in prison. I had to stay close until Moira arrived and could pick up the tail.
I bolted out of my chair and left the bar, my cane in hand but not needed. Through the opening to the right of the hostess stand, I saw a human blur going out the front door of the restaurant. I hustled after it, four seconds behind. I went through the front door and looked to the left and the staircase that led up to the street. Two figures, attached as one, coming down it. No one was going up. I looked to the right, under the blurred lighting of the restaurant’s eaves.
A form. Male, moving away toward the lookout behind the restaurant with the view of La Jolla Cove or a right turn around the corner to the back door of Muldoon’s and a staircase beyond that led to the second floor of the building. And multiple escape routes. If he went to the lookout, he’d have to come back in my direction to leave. If he turned right and went up the stairs, I might never see him again.
He turned right at the end of the restaurant.
Alone. Limited vision. No choice. I had to keep my eyes on him if I had any shot at getting Turk out of jail.
Instinct pushed me forward and I rushed along the walkway. Cane in front of me, not tapping, but moving it back and forth to give the illusion it was guiding me in case the Invisible Man suddenly reappeared. I needed to hide the capabilities I had left.
I hit the corner and turned. No one. A click of the door to the enclosed staircase closing forty feet ahead.
“I want to go look at the ocean!” A woman’s slurred voice from behind, toward the front of Muldoon’s. The couple I’d seen coming down the stairs.
I rushed toward the enclosed staircase. Twenty feet out.
“No, let’s listen to some blues.” Male voice from the same direction of the woman. Arguing about what to do.
Ten feet from the door to the staircase.
“I’m going without you.” The woman’s voice behind, in the courtyard.
I made it to the staircase door and whipped it open. Dark. Lights off.
A hard punch into my stomach. The air blew out of me. My cane rattled to the ground. I swung at the dark figure in front of me. My fist grazed his head. The fist in my stomach grabbed and ripped across my abdomen. Searing pain. Not a fist.