San Diego Noir

by Maryelizabeth Hart

  “So you killed her?”

  “You still don’t get it, do you? You killed her.”

  “What the fuck do you mean by that?” I slammed my palm against the table, making it jump.

  “You’ve been having an affair with her for months. There’s plenty of documentation of that. Phone records, saved texts, surveillance video showing you coming to the house at all hours. I bet if we subpoenaed the GPS records of your company car, they’d back that up.”

  “But … not with her. Not the real Sharon.”

  “Phone records and texts don’t divulge that kind of detail. So you’ve been having an affair with a married woman. Tonight, she called you. You came over. I guess you fought or something, and … well, you just snapped.”

  “But that’s not what happened!” I said.

  He smiled, and the jam I had put myself in started to become clear.

  “It doesn’t have to be what happened,” he continued. “But it might have been, and we can prove that version if we have to. There’s video of you coming in here tonight. There’s her phone call—her last phone call, to your cell. That’s your company car outside.”

  I stared at them, my gaze shifting from one impassive face to the other. “What kind of sap do you think I am?”

  “How many kinds do there have to be?” Lacie asked, throwing me the kind of smile that a day ago would have caused a stirring at my groin instead of nausea in my gut. “We only needed one. It was down to you or the pool service guy, and I liked you better.”

  Terry picked up where he had left off. “Or it could go this way. Lacie has an apartment, down by the Cove. We were all there tonight, the three of us. A kinky little threesome. Some man-on-man action, along with both of us on Lacie.”

  “I don’t—”

  “I don’t either,” Terry said. “That’s why it’s beautiful. A man in my position, with my reputation, would never make up something like that just for an alibi. It’s too embarrassing. So everybody will believe it. I’m still important enough in this town to keep it quiet, but the people who need a story—a few detectives, a prosecutor or two—we’ll give them a story they’d never imagine was a lie.”

  “You killed her.” I was slow, but I wasn’t impenetrable after all. “You fucking killed her for the insurance money!”

  “I guess you weren’t with him for his brains,” Terry said.

  “Not hardly,” Lacie agreed. “To be fair, that wasn’t what he saw in me, either.” She squeezed her arms together, popping her breasts out. “It’s all about the jugs, isn’t it, Mike?”

  I scraped my chair back, stood up fast enough to knock it over with a loud crash. I picked it up, then realized I had put my fingerprints on it. They were all over the house. I’d never be able to wipe them all. “You make me sick!” I said. “Both of you!”

  “We’re not particularly interested in your opinion of us, Mike,” Terry said. “You were meant to serve a purpose. You’ve served it. Now, you either go to prison for Sharon’s murder, or you alibi us and we alibi you. Sharon goes into the unsolved files, and everybody’s happy.”

  “Not everybody. Not me. I didn’t kill anybody.”

  “You stay out of jail. We’ll help you out financially, of course. Say, fifty thousand when the insurance check clears. Another fifty in three years, if you’ve kept up your end of the bargain. Not life-changing money, but a pretty nice little bonus.”

  I buried my face in my hands, paced the kitchen, scratched my head, my arms. Everything itched. How could I have been so stupid? I wondered. Then I looked at Lacie, and remembered.

  She had been straight with me in the beginning. She’d told me she did what she needed to do to get money. What made me think that fucking me was any different from fucking Terry?

  And that face I’d seen in the window one day, behind a sheer curtain. That had been Sharon, who had known, even then, that something was happening around her. She could have called out, could have told somebody. Was she a willing accomplice in all this? Knowing she wouldn’t die but couldn’t really live, wanting to let Terry get the big paycheck?

  That was what I told myself when I finally agreed to Terry’s plan. I kept telling myself that through the investigation, the hours and hours of interrogation. When it was over, when it didn’t look like I was being fired because of suspicion, charges never leveled against me, Gold Shield cut me loose. The fifty grand came in handy then, and I was barely able to stretch it for the three years until the next fifty.

  When he brought me that second fifty, a surprisingly small bundle in a reusable Ralph’s grocery bag, Terry looked worn out. His face was blotchy and lined, his hair unkempt. Dark half-moons drooped from his eyes like a crying woman’s mascara. We had become something resembling friends over the past three years, meeting at bars every now and then, or at the Cove, watching the seals play, talking about our lives. Mostly me talking, him listening; many of my friends had drifted away after the murder, losing my job. I didn’t have people I could talk to who really understood what I’d been through, except him.

  But not this time.

  He sat in my living room, on a Goodwill couch, slouched forward with his arms on his knees, doing almost all the talking. “I never should have married her,” he said. “That’s when it all started to go wrong.”

  I’d seen the wedding in the newspaper. His wife in the grave just over a year, some had clucked about it but he’d said life goes on, it’s what Sharon would have wanted for him. A detective named Givens had stopped by the next day, asked what I thought about it. I told him they deserved each other, and left it at that.

  “Wrong how?”

  “She’s a captivating woman, don’t get me wrong. Well, you know that already, don’t you? But she’s only interested in one thing, really. When it comes down to it, it’s always been the money for her.”

  “I thought that’s what you wanted.”

  “She gets under your skin.”

  “Tell me.”

  “But no matter what she says, whatever we do, I always know it’s the money she’s doing it for.”

  “Life sucks,” I said.

  “I’m worried, Mike. She made me sign a prenup, but it’s all in her favor. If I die, she’s a rich woman.”

  “I guess you’ve been investing more wisely.”

  “I’ve made some good plays, I don’t mind saying. That insurance money saved my ass.”

  “And now she wants to kill your ass.”

  “That’s what I think. We’ve got to kill her first, Mike. It’s the only way out.”

  “We?”

  “I’ve still got the goods on you. I could bury you with one phone call. Not just Sharon’s murder, but the ongoing blackmail.”

  “Blackmail?”

  He kicked the grocery bag. “You think there aren’t records of these big withdrawals?”

  “If I’m being accused of blackmail, I might as well ask for more.”

  “You’ll have it, don’t worry. Help me get loose of Lacie, and you’ll have plenty.”

  “No,” I said. “Absolutely not.”

  “Seems to me like you really don’t have much choice.”

  She called me two days later, on an unseasonably gloomy autumn afternoon when the sun had ducked behind a gray haze and wouldn’t show itself again. When I recognized her voice, I almost called her Sharon, but I caught myself in time.

  “Meet me,” she said. “At the cross.”

  “When?”

  “Now. Soon as you can.”

  I was home in Mission Beach, so it took awhile to get up there. When I arrived, she was sitting on the bench, our bench. We were above much of the haze there, but it sat all around us like a thick, fuzzy blanket, blocking out the world below. Sounds of traffic on the 5 and 52 freeways wafted gently up. The parking area was deserted. I zipped up my leather jacket and approached her, half expecting her to pull a gun.

  “You came.” She wore a considerably more expensive leather coat, and leather gloves with fur
linings. Her jeans were expensive too. She was still beautiful, would always be beautiful, but she was more finished than she had been in the old days, before she was Mrs. Terrance Paulson. She’d even had her teeth fixed.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “You’ve always known.”

  She reached up, took my hand, pulled me onto the bench beside her, the outer edges of our thighs touching. I could smell her. That, at least, hadn’t changed.

  “He’s going to kill me,” she began.

  A chill ran though me, as if my clothes had suddenly dissolved and I was sitting naked on this fog-enshrouded mountain. “What makes you think that?”

  “The way he looks at me. I can tell.” She gave a single dry chuckle. “I’ve seen it before, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “So I know.”

  “What are you going to do about it? You can’t exactly go to the cops.”

  “What am I going to do?” She put her hand on my leg, rested her head on my shoulder. Two fingernails began tracing up my thigh. “You mean, what are we going to do?”

  “We?”

  “Of course.”

  “Hold on, Lacie.”

  “What?” she said. She had shifted again, so her mouth was close to my ear, her voice a low purr. Her breasts pressed against my arm, and those fingers kept tracking north. “It’s always been you and me, Mike. Always. I just … I just had to bide my time. Until it was safe.”

  “Safe? You call that safe? You’re talking about killing your husband.”

  “Safer than letting him kill me. And don’t worry, if he goes, I inherit everything. And then there’s his life insurance—I’m the beneficiary on that too.”

  “Some people just don’t learn,” I said.

  Her lips grazed my cheek. Her fingers found home.

  I was right. I was the only one of the three of us who hadn’t taken part in a murder, and yet I was lunging for that night-crawler, the one with the hook inside, the barbs that would jab into my cheek and draw me along. Some people just don’t learn.

  When it came to lures and hooks, hers were better than Terry’s, and they always would be. But if Terry was murdered, the cops would take an especially close look, given Sharon’s fate. They might even reopen that case. And I didn’t know what Terry had done with the goods he had on me, when they might show up.

  I pulled myself away. The effort was almost more than I could make. “Listen, Lacie, I … I have to go.”

  “So soon? You just got here.” She twirled some hair around her right index finger, then lowered the finger slowly, letting it glide across the swell of her breast. “We’re all alone.”

  “I know. But we’ll have plenty of time for that, right?”

  Lacie smiled. “Yes. All the time we need.”

  “Then there’s no rush.”

  “No rush.”

  “I’ll call you,” I said. I turned and made for my car as fast as I could, afraid I’d change my mind, go back to her, throw her down on that cold stone bench and take her right there.

  Take her. Funny how a simple phrase can have multiple meanings.

  I got in the car and turned the key, listening to the engine start, the radio come on.

  During the next few days, I’d have to kill someone, or help do it.

  Between now and then, I had a lot of thinking to do.

  They wanted to turn me from a fake murderer into a real one. I was willing to go along with that. What I didn’t want was to be left out in the cold when it was over.

  The time had finally come, I thought, to look out for myself. Time to chart my own course again, to pick my path through the unbroken darkness. I knew what Terry had to offer, and what Lacie did.

  I looked back once, in the rearview, and saw Lacie sitting on our bench, arms wrapped around herself to fend off the cold, and I wondered which one I would choose.

  KEY WITNESS

  BY MARTHA C. LAWRENCE

  La Jolla Cove

  The beach was nearly empty. I checked my air hose and regulator—twice—before diving into the surf. The early-morning skies over La Jolla Cove were clear and blue but beneath the sparkling surface the tides were restless and the water murky. On the plus side, a tropical storm brewing up from Mexico had warmed the ocean by a degree or two. On the down side, the storm had churned up a lot of debris. Visibility near shore wasn’t great; fifteen feet at best.

  The ocean can be murderous. Ask any life insurance agent who writes policies for scuba divers. But gliding nearly naked underwater is as close as I’ve come to free flight, and the irresistible sensuality of it overrides my usual caution about such things. Admittedly, it was stupid to dive alone that June morning. No excuses there. I rationalized that my dive partner would be arriving any minute. I promised myself I wouldn’t go out too far.

  Swimming through the shallow water, I pushed past rocky ledges filled with lobsters, shrimp, crabs, and abalone. Divers here can look but cannot touch; the cove is an ecological preserve. Visibility improved the farther out I swam. Tempted by schools of small bass and bright orange garibaldi, I covered a few hundred yards.

  I hesitated when I reached the swirling masses of feather-boa kelp that spanned the outer edge of the cove. The dense plants made me feel claustrophobic. Kicking hard, I shot through the kelp forest and the bottom dropped away to thirty feet. That’s where I saw Wendy, though I didn’t know her name at the time.

  Her long, blond hair undulated with the tide. Looking down at her, I couldn’t see her face. For one hopeful moment I thought she might be a mermaid, unencumbered as she was by scuba gear. But mermaids don’t wear bikinis, and they don’t have ghostly white legs. Her arms stretched in front of her as though reaching for some treasure at the bottom of the sea. Moving closer, I saw the dull glint of metal at her wrists. She wasn’t reaching for anything; she was handcuffed to a heavy chain that was anchored to the ocean floor.

  It was terribly quiet. I remembered to breathe, and soon heard the reassuring sound of oxygen rushing through my air hose, followed by my own carbon dioxide bubbling toward the surface.

  I knew from the woman’s rigid form that she was past saving. I swam around her body and looked into a face so likeable that it broke my heart. She hadn’t been in the water for long. Her skin was smooth and unblemished, except for some redness where her wrists chafed against the handcuffs. Her mouth was open to the sea that filled her lungs. Her wide green eyes seemed to be staring at a small leather pouch on a thin leather strap that floated loosely around her neck.

  Feeling an urgent need for fresh air, I followed the chain up to the surface, where it attached to a buoy floating about three hundred yards from shore. Treading water, I removed my mouthpiece and took several grateful breaths.

  A crowd had gathered on the beach to watch the activity offshore. Coast Guard officers in small boats had been posted around the crime scene to keep swimmers away as divers searched for evidence.

  “What time did you find the body?” Carlos Rico, one of the officers who’d responded to my 911 call, had been interviewing me for some time. We’d already covered this question. My answer didn’t change.

  “Sometime between seven-ten and seven-fifteen.”

  “You seem pretty sure about that.”

  I shrugged. “Occupational habit. I’m an investigator.”

  He made a note on his report. “Private?”

  “Yeah.” I fished a business card out of the backpack I’d retrieved from my truck and handed it over. The type read, Elizabeth Chase, Psychic Investigator. Rico studied the card for a moment before attaching it to his clipboard. If he thought there was anything peculiar about my title, he didn’t let on.

  “You say you got here about ten minutes to seven and went in the water a few minutes after seven. Can anyone confirm that?”

  I looked around to see if I recognized anyone on the beach, someone who might have seen me go into the water.

  “Not r
eally. My dive partner was supposed to meet me here, but I guess she couldn’t make it this morning.” Shivering in my damp bathing suit, I watched Rico print my statement word for word. The sudden blaring of car horns and screeching of brakes made us both look up.

  The uncommon sight of police and emergency vehicles in the posh La Jolla neighborhood had caused a nasty traffic jam on Coast Boulevard, the road that snakes along the shoreline. Residents in the high-rise condominiums facing the ocean had come out onto their balconies to see what the ruckus was all about. Some of them looked cranky. They’d plunked down several million dollars for their homes. Klieg lights and crime scene looky-loos were not the view they’d bargained for.

  The Motorola on Rico’s hip spit out a static-filled message. I only caught part of it, something about moving the body. I felt a sudden stab of protectiveness toward the dead woman, as if my discovering her somehow made me responsible for her too.

  “Where are they taking her?” I asked.

  “The lifeguard station in Quivera Basin.”

  That made sense. Quivera was a fairly remote location at the mouth of Mission Bay. Far from the beach-going masses, it would be a good place to examine and identify the body.

  Rico’s female partner, an officer several years his senior, took over the questioning. By the time we were done, my bathing suit was dry. She took one last look at my business card.

  “Is this information up-to-date?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Okay, you’re free to go. A case investigator will be in touch with you soon.”

  Heading back to my truck, I had the uneasy feeling that comes over me when I sense I’m being stared at. I looked up at the condominiums clinging to the cliff. If someone was peering down at me, I couldn’t tell. The reflected sunlight in the windows of the ocean-facing condos made them impenetrable as one-way mirrors.

  Later that afternoon, the case detective rang my doorbell as I was working in my home office. I checked him out in the CCTV monitor above my desk, the one that’s fed by a hidden security camera and microphone on my front porch. His thick silver hair, dark eyebrows, and sharp features were reminiscent of Sean Connery, but his wrinkle-free pants and unfashionable jacket screamed undercover detective. He was whistling a haunting rendition of “Stairway to Heaven” and looking vaguely bored. Like any good investigator, he hadn’t called in advance to announce his visit. I closed the file I was working on and went to the door.