by Pat Muir
They were evidently in now, since Roger started the conversation. “About six weeks after Art disappeared, Mary told us that Bob was getting worse and she was going to have to put him in a VA-sponsored nursing home in…Los Angeles, I think.”
“I’m pretty sure it was Irvine,” chimed in his wife, “but why are you so interested in the Smiths?”
I temporized. “I believe they might have information pertinent to the men we believe killed Mr. Flynn.”
“I heard they had discovered his body up north,” said Roger, “and somebody cut his head off too.” The newspapers had indeed reported the story under the headline: “Body of Convicted Money Launderer’s Victim Found. I had looked at the headline and noted it inferred without specifically saying that Swift had killed Flynn.
“Do you know the name of the nursing home or Smith’s referring physician?” I asked them.
“Not a clue,” replied Roger, his wife nodding in agreement.
“Do you remember which sales agent sold the Smith home?” I asked.
“I think it was Sam Laurel and Associates,” said Mabel, “That’s who Art used to work for.”
I made a mental note to visit Sam afterwards. “This is a lovely retirement home,” said Mabel. “The staff are so kind and helpful. My kids say that when they retire, they would like a place like this.”
The Bessins rambled on about their children and their homes in distant states, the infrequency of their visits, their grandchildren, their occupations, their dreams, and their travel plans. I did not want to interrupt them, because I was accepting their hospitality by drinking their coffee and munching their cookies. I just hoped some relevant information might arise so that I could turn the conversation to my concerns. Finally, Roger asked, “Shane, are you planning to retire soon? You’d love this place.”
“I’m not ready for retirement yet,” I replied. “I’m still trying to solve the murder you read about in the paper and its connection to Larry Swift, the man who was sent to jail for money laundering.”
“Oh yes. We remember that,” said Mabel. “It’s hard to believe our park was owned by a crook. Did you know that Marge Holmes, who was living with him, had to go back to work? In fact, she works as a waitress part time here at Wesley Palms. You should talk to her; she might know more about the Smiths than we do.”
I planned to avoid talking to Marge Holmes at that time, since I didn’t want her to know the dead man might not be Flynn. “Why don’t you tell me what you know about the Smiths before I talk to Marge,” I said.
Mabel replied, “Mary is a sweet gal. She worked as a waitress in New Mexico at a truck stop, where she met Bob, who drove a truck. She developed multiple sclerosis in her twenties and agreed to marry Bob, who said he would look after her during an incapacitating bout of the disease. She told me she hoped that when he married her, he would look after her and raise a family together. But Bob, it turned out, did not want children. He said he had a son who had been turned against him by his estranged ex-wife. On top of that, Bob, a constant smoker, developed emphysema soon after and couldn’t work anymore. He was pensioned off and became very frugal. That’s what Mary told us, and she hardly had money for clothes. She even offered to do clothes washing and cleaning for me to make some pocket money. I believe she did some for Art Flynn as well.”
Roger added the caveat: “I don’t think Bob needed to be that frugal; he had a steady pension and told me he had some savings. I think his illness made him paranoid about money. He seemed to blame Mary for having MS. It wasn’t fair how he kept Mary on a shoestring. She deserved better.”
“When did you last see Bob?” I asked.
“I don’t actually remember,” replied Roger. “Do you, Mabel?”
“Not really,” she replied. “He sort of faded away. He smoked despite having emphysema. Crazy! Wasn’t it? I would hear him coughing and coughing. Mary would occasionally take him to the VA hospital in Los Angeles early in the morning so as to beat traffic. She would come home late and push him in his wheelchair up the ramp into his home.”
That got my attention. “You saw him in his wheelchair after Art disappeared?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” replied Mabel. Poor man, bent over, dressed in a hoodie, and covered by a blanket and coughing away.”
“Did you actually see his face?” I asked.
Mabel looked surprised at being asked the question and took her time to reply. “Now that you mention it, I didn’t see his face. I was so used to seeing the hoodie and the blanket that I was sure it was him.” She looked at me and asked, “Could I have been wrong?”
I don’t know, “I replied and changed the subject rapidly. “What do you know about Bob’s estranged son?”
“Don’t know a thing,” said Roger, “except I believe he lives in New York City.”
“Do you know his name?” I asked.
“No,” he replied.
Mabel butted in. “Bob told me once his ex-wife loved movies with Kirk Douglas and that she named her son after him.”
“Kirk, you mean,” I said.
“No, Kirk was his stage name. I don’t remember his given name, but the choice irritated Bob no end…said it was crazy for his wife to give his son a Jewish name…said she did it to spite him.”
CHAPTER 31
I looked at my watch. It read 1:23 p.m. I had been talking to the Bessins or had been talked at by them for nearly three and a half hours. I asked to use their toilet. Time to go and explore leads. I thanked them for their hospitality and declined their invitation to accompany them to the Wesley Palms cafeteria. “Please come back and visit with us,” said Mabel as I left.
I promised I would. I then drove to Sam Laurel’s real estate office in San Marcos and was delighted to find its owner there. Sam said he remembered me as I was escorted into his small conference room. “How may I help you?” he asked in his stilted military tone.
“Do you keep records of real estate sales of seven years ago?” was my question.
“Not usually,” he replied. “Do you have anything specific in mind?”
“Yes. I’m told you sold the mobile home belonging to the Smiths in space 76 in the Palomar South Park shortly after Art Flynn disappeared,” I said.
“You’re in luck,” replied Sam. “Art was the mobile home specialist in the office, and I took over the niche in the hope I could keep it for him when he returned. I think I sold two more mobile homes that year, the Smith unit as well as Art’s home. Their files are still in my desk, which I have planned to clean up for the past year.” He walked over to his desk and began searching through it. Not finding what he was looking for, he turned his attention to one of two adjacent file cabinets. “I’m sure I have it,” he said as I sat waiting. About ten minutes later, now on the second file cabinet, Sam waved a couple of files with an exclamation: “Got them!”
He took the documents from the file and spread them over the conference table. I examined the closing escrow statement for the Smith home and wrote down the address the settlement funds of ninety-four thousand dollars had been sent to…a location in Irvine, California. I saw no mortgage payoff on the escrow document. Robert Smith had owned his home free and clear in joint tenancy with his wife.
“Why are you looking at the Smith sale?” asked Sam.
I simply told him it was a police matter. Sam was smart enough not to question me further. I looked at the listing agreement; it was signed by Robert and Mary Smith. “Did you see Robert sign this?” I asked.
“Ah…no,” replied Sam. “The poor man was so ill. I could hear him coughing away in the bedroom. Mary took the agreement in for him to sign and returned it to me.”
Sam looked at me quizzically, as though expecting me to comment. I did not. The file contained a photograph of the front of the mobile home. My eyes gleamed. It also showed the green handicap-equipped van of the Smiths in the driveway.
“Do you have a magnifying glass?” I asked. Sam went out of the conference room and asked one of his agent
s, and he returned with one a couple of minutes later. I looked closely at the photograph and was just able to make out the van’s license plate number. I jotted the number down. “Did you ever hear from the Smiths afterwards?” I asked.
“No” came the reply. Sam then laid down the sale documents pertaining to Art’s home. We looked at the listing agreement, known to have been signed by Flynn, and compared its signature to the listing document for the Smith home. Sam said nothing, but he could see as well as I the similarity of the handwriting.
“I need to take these documents, and I would appreciate you not discussing what we have seen together here.” Sam nodded his assent.
I signed a receipt for them and returned to my office. I checked DMV records to find the name and address of the current owner of the Smith van. It was not in the California records, so I sent my request to the other states. Time now to tell my boss what I was up to and get authorization to continue.
I intercepted Steve just as he exited his private office, and I said I had important information on the Flynn case. He motioned me into his office and listened intently as I spoke.
“We have been convinced that Flynn was murdered by Bailey, helped possibly by Andy Collins despite his denying involvement. The dead body in the car and the matching DNA told us there was a murder, and we stretched to see how that was done, including initially stretching to accuse Dollar and Johnson of the crime. Since we had no corpse and a stretch on how the killing was done, we were able only to prosecute and convict Larry Swift of conspiracy to commit murder rather than murder itself. Noteworthy was that both he and Andy Collins said they had nothing to do with it. The autopsy shows that the body was decapitated. No head was found. It puzzled me why the head had been cut off when Flynn clearly didn’t participate in money laundering and didn’t merit that kind of retributive penalty. So, I began to wonder if both Swift and Collins were telling the truth. Finally, when I looked at the autopsy report, it said the skeleton exhibited arthritis. That wasn’t consistent with Flynn. He was running in the park when he found Swanson entering the vacant mobile home. Even though the DNA and the driving license in the burial site identified the corpse as Flynn’s, I began to believe it might be somebody else’s. That didn’t make sense either. It required Flynn to substitute a body for his and trick our forensics into believing substituted biomaterial was from him. I checked with Danny Chu, and he said it was possible that DNA sampling could have thus been compromised. The only body it might have been was Flynn’s very sick neighbor, Bob Smith, but that seemed impossible, since I heard him coughing in his adjacent mobile home every time I was there. Also, Bob was seen by his neighbors after Flynn disappeared. I have just ascertained Bob Smith was not actually seen by his neighbors. They believed they had seen him when Mary Smith wheeled out somebody in a hoodie with a recognizable blanket on a wheelchair. I think the head was cut off so dental records could not be used to identify the corpse. I think Flynn came back and substituted himself for Bob and its Bob’s corpse that was found.”
“Wow…! That’s quite a mouthful,” said Steve. “Why would they want to make that illegal substitution?”
“I don’t know the answer to that.”
“Have you got any specific evidence at this point?”
I showed Steve the escrow and sales listing documents for the Smith mobile home. Mary Smith had written her signature consistently in the two documents. Bob Smith’s signatures were not consistent between the two documents. I produced Flynn’s employment application, which I had recovered from the evidence file, and the listing document on his mobile home, and I thrust them by the side of the other two documents. Steve looked at them carefully for nearly a minute before he spoke.
“I’m not a writing expert, but I would think you’re right in suspecting these signatures are all in Flynn’s handwriting. You’d better get these documents to forensics’ handwriting expert.” He paused. “I would prefer we don’t notify the impacted parties until you can confirm your suspicion. We have enough time before that hearing where you’re required to give evidence. So, go ahead. Give this your priority. I will notify the Sonoma County district attorney that we have questions about the identity of the corpse so they don’t do more work preparing to prosecute Swift for murder.”
I left Steve’s office very pleased with myself, and I did some initial work before I went home. I did a reverse search to find the phone number of the address, an Irvine apartment, to which the Smith home sales proceeds had been sent. I phoned that number only to be told that there was nobody called Smith at that home, apartment 46, which they had occupied for five years. The responder gave the phone number of the apartment manager. The manager was not on duty, but I left a message for him to call me back. I then went home and drank two large glasses of wine to celebrate that I was near to closing this missing person case.
The next morning, I phoned the escrow office, explained who I was, and asked them to check their records. I wanted to see at which bank the escrow check from the sale of the Smith home had been cashed. The escrow company officer said she wasn’t sure if they had kept records that old but that she would get back to me later. The Irvine apartment manager phoned to say she had been in residence there for six years and that she could not tell me who had been in that apartment 46, since records of all former tenants were discarded after four years. I asked her if any of the neighbors living near unit number 46 had lived there more than seven years.
“Yes, there was one, a Mr. and Mrs. Jones in number 48.”
She gave me their phone number. I phoned and reached Mrs. Jones.
“Oh yes, I remember, there was a Diane Sparks” came the voice of an elderly lady.
“Do you know where she moved to?” I asked.
“To heaven, my dear,” came the reply. “Poor Diane passed away due to cancer five or six years ago.”
“Did she have a sister called Mary who visited her?” I asked.
“Can’t remember that, I’m afraid,” replied Mrs. Jones.
A dead end, not untypical of detective work, a result I am used to, one I have learned not to be discouraged by. The escrow company office manager called me just after lunch to say that the check to the Smiths was Number 6318 through the Wells Fargo Bank branch in San Marcos. It had been cashed, and only that bank would possibly have a record of what account it was paid into. She gave me their account number and said she would e-mail the bank to let them know it would be okay for me to ask them that question. I did not have a warrant, so that permission was necessary. I called the Wells Fargo branch half an hour later and explained I wanted to see who had signed that check number and into whose account the check had been paid.
“A check that is over seven years old,” the bank officer said. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
I assured him it was important to my investigation of a murder. “I’ll do my best, but I can’t guarantee that I’ll find the record, and it will take me a couple of days to investigate,” he replied.
The next day, I got an e-mail from the New Mexico DMV. The title of the Smith van had passed from the Smiths to a Bobby Colson, who lived in Albuquerque, in December 2008 and then to a local scrap yard in March 2012. I got Colson’s phone number and called him. His wife answered the phone and told me her husband was out.
“Is there anything I can help you with,” she asked.
I explained who I was. “I wanted to find out about the couple who owned the green GMC van your husband bought seven years ago.”
“We actually bought it from a dealer in town… Let me think…that would be Westin Motors on Dubuque Street.”
“Are they still in business?”
“Yes, they are. Hold on, and I’ll give you their phone number.”
I hear Mrs. Carlson rustling some paper before she returned to the phone. “It’s too bad that Donny crashed the van; it was a good one. We bought another from Jim Westin, not as nice as the first one. That’s why I have his phone number handy.” She paused. “Do you have a
pencil and paper handy?”
I told her I did, and she gave me the pertinent number. I promptly called Westin Motors, and the owner picked up the phone “Jim Westin here. How may I help you?”
I explained my mission and asked him if he remembered buying a green handicap-equipped van seven years ago…the one he’d sold to Donny Colson. “Yeah. I do remember it. They had a ginger cat that got out of its carrier, and we had a hell of a time chasing it. I would keep poking a broom under my cars to get it to come out only for it to go under another one. I got my pants all dirty from that.”
“Could you describe the people you bought it from?”
“Well, she was a nice-looking woman with reddish hair. I would have made a pass at her if she wasn’t married.”
“And the man?”
“About forty-five to fifty years old with glasses and white hair. A pretty trim-looking fellow.”
That clearly was Arthur Flynn. “Did they say where they were going?”
“They took a taxi, and that was the last I saw of them.”
“Who signed the title over?
“Both of them. I was a little worried they were taking such a low price. The man said the van had belonged to his mother, who had just passed away. They did not need it anymore, and looking at it reminded them of his mom’s pain and her struggle with the wheelchair.”
“Did you check their ID?”
“As I remember, she produced her driver’s license. He only had a paper copy with him. It did show the correct name on the title, so I didn’t worry that the picture was too dark to be readable.”
“Did they say why they were selling the van there in New Mexico rather than in their home state?”
“I didn’t ask. It was a very good deal for me.”
That’s how dealers get into trouble.
CHAPTER 32