Crime Scene

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “And then?”

  “I finished my talk, ate as little rubber chicken as possible, went to bed.”

  “By yourself,” I said.

  He put his glass down. “Yes, Deputy. Nobody can corroborate that.”

  “You didn’t speak to Rennert at any point later that night, phone or in person?”

  “No. Whatever he was so worked up about, it was his issue and his alone.”

  “You didn’t go to his house.”

  “Absolutely not,” Delaware said. He seemed more amused than annoyed. “I have no idea where he lives.”

  Easy enough to learn. But no reason to claim he—or anyone—could cause Rennert’s aorta to shred, even if he’d sneaked up behind and yelled “Boo.” Medically, the stress of their confrontation might’ve been a contributing factor. From my perspective, though, that didn’t amount to anything more than a tragic end to a tragic story.

  Not an accident. Certainly not a homicide.

  “How did he die?” Delaware asked.

  I smiled. Not going to answer that.

  He laughed. “All right. I get it.”

  He checked his watch, then glanced over at the bar.

  A woman—petite, extravagantly curvy, with a full head of auburn hair—waved. Like Delaware, she was dressed in black. Tight black.

  He raised a hand to her and stood. “Got to go, Deputy Edison. Good luck finding whatever it is you’re looking for.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Tatiana called the next day asking for an update.

  Bad timing. I’d spoken to Delaware in the hope of finding information I could use to cushion her landing.

  I had nothing for her.

  RENNERT WALTER J.

  SUBMIT

  One click and it’d all be over.

  I minimized the window, thinking: Coward.

  “I’m finished with your father’s property,” I said. “If you want it back.”

  “His property,” she said.

  “The phone and whatnot.”

  Instantly I regretted it. I could tell that she could tell that I was putting her off.

  “Fine,” she said, as if I were a phone voice and we’d never met. “When do I get it?”

  The stock reply: You’re free to pick the items up from our facility, between eight thirty and five, Monday through Friday.

  I said, “I can bring it by tonight. Six thirty work?”

  “I’d planned to head over to his house to pick up the last of the boxes. I’m not sure how long I’ll be.”

  “I can meet you there,” I said.

  “Would you, please? That’d be easier.”

  Her tone had softened nicely.

  I couldn’t bring myself to ask what the hell I was doing. I knew what I was doing. I knew that if Tatiana had the face of a toad, the conversation would’ve already ended.

  Never would’ve begun.

  But Tatiana did not have the face of a toad.

  “Of course,” I said. “See you then.”

  I put down the receiver.

  Shupfer had leaned around her monitor to stare at me.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  She shook her head, went back to her work.

  “Shoops,” I said. “What you looking at me like that for?”

  “I’m not looking at you.”

  “You were.”

  She met my eye. “We’re not a delivery service.”

  “Beg pardon?” I said.

  She resumed typing.

  An open plan office makes it hard not to form opinions. I do it. But you don’t expect to hear them spoken aloud. Keep to yourself and go about your business. It’s phony, sure, but only as phony as civilization in general.

  That Shupfer was right only pissed me off all the more.

  “That’s a great tip, thanks,” I said. “Lemme write that down.”

  She ignored me.

  I shoved back from my desk and went to the coffee station.

  Moffett came up beside me, poured his own cup, spoke low:

  “Don’t get on her, man.”

  “She’s the one getting on me,” I said, wringing a sugar packet.

  “She’s having a bad time. You can’t take it personal.”

  “What bad time?”

  “Danny.”

  The anger went out of me, displaced by guilt. “Shit. Is he okay?”

  “I dunno,” he said. “I think they had to take him to the ER last night.”

  “Shit. I didn’t know.”

  “I don’t think I’m supposed to know, either. I heard her ask Vitti for tomorrow off. She and Scott need to take him to some specialist.”

  I glanced across the squad room. Shupfer had her head down. “I feel like a dick.”

  “Don’t sweat it,” he said. “I’m giving you the FYI.”

  He poked around inside the communal pastry box, pressing down to collect cake crumbs on the pads of his fingers. “What’s the deal, though. You’re making deliveries?”

  I stared at him.

  “Chill, homey,” he said. He licked a sugary thumb. “I’m just asking.”

  He grinned, slapped me on the butt, and sauntered back to his desk.

  —

  THE GROUND-FLOOR LIGHTS were on as I pulled up the driveway to Rennert’s house. Tatiana had left her Prius at an uncomfortable angle. It was her house now—one-third hers—and she could park any damn place she wanted to.

  Walking to the door, I was struck by how much cooler and calmer the spot felt in comparison with the last time I’d been there. The seasons, turned over. The frenzy, long gone, leaving behind a stillness both easeful and lonesome, dry trees shuffling in the wind.

  Before knocking, I smoothed down my uniform. It didn’t smell too bad. I could’ve changed, but it had seemed prudent not to. Keep me in line. Give me a façade of validity.

  Distantly: “It’s open.”

  I found her at the head of the dining room table, clutching handfuls of paper, staring defeatedly into yet another box. An empty juice glass sat on the sideboard alongside an open bottle of white wine.

  She didn’t look up. “I’m trying to figure out how much of this I can toss.”

  The table was vast, long enough to seat sixteen comfortably, though I doubted it had seen any recent action. Cobwebs entangled the carved chair-backs and laced the sconces. On one wall, a roiling seascape stretched nearly to the rafters.

  “It’s like he didn’t know you’re allowed to throw things out,” she said. “Look at this.”

  I stood beside her and she showed me a creased instruction manual for a robotic vacuum. The tendons in her forearms stood out like train tracks. “I don’t even think he owns one of these.”

  She tossed the manual to the floor, facing me at last. “What’ve we got.”

  I gave her the phone, still in its evidence bag.

  “I can open it?” she asked.

  “It’s yours,” I said.

  She didn’t open it. She stood there, feeling the screen through the plastic, and I reached in my backpack for a second evidence bag, containing the pill bottles from the attic.

  “I don’t need those,” she said.

  “Right, but they were his, so I’m required to return them to you.”

  I wondered if she’d notice the Risperdal. But she tossed the bag on the table with a clatter. “Anything else?”

  The third and final bag contained the crystal whiskey glass her father had been holding when he died.

  “I don’t want it,” she said.

  I hesitated.

  “I mean it. I don’t care what you’re required to do. Get it the fuck away from me. Those, too.”

  I tucked both the pills and the tumbler in my backpack.

  She stepped abruptly to the sideboard and lifted the wine bottle. “Do you want?”

  “No, thanks. I should hit the road.”

  Perhaps I’d made her self-conscious; she stopped at a quarter glass. She took a quick sip and set it aside, sanding her pal
ms. “Before you go, do me a favor, while you’re here? In the basement. I could use a pair of hands.”

  I followed her through the kitchen and into a service porch, down plank stairs lit by a bare forty-watt bulb.

  “Watch your head,” she said.

  I ducked a jutting two-by-four, stepping down into a long, fusty space that stank of rotting wood. Along one wall ran the wine racks Zaragoza had mentioned. The floor was raw concrete, showing concentric traces left by water pooling and evaporating, time and again. Tatiana continued to the far end of the room, where sat a pair of gigantic gravity furnaces, arms flying off every which way. Lodged between them, like an outmatched referee, was an X-braced steel shelving unit, walling off a group of three boxes pushed into the basement’s rear corner.

  “That’s all that’s left,” she said.

  “More instruction manuals.”

  She smiled tiredly. “Yeah. And this guy’s completely stuck.” To prove her point she grabbed one of the shelving unit’s uprights, yanking it back and forth to no effect.

  I gave it a tug: wedged in there pretty good. “We can try brute force, but I wouldn’t recommend it. You’ll scrape the ducts up, and you don’t want to do that.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re covered in asbestos.”

  She recoiled.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “It’s harmless as is. You just don’t want particles getting into the air. Did he kept tools somewhere? We could take it apart. That’d be the easiest way.”

  “I think there’s some upstairs.”

  “WD-40 would be great, too, if you have it.”

  She disappeared, bringing back a screwdriver, a pair of pliers, and a blue-and-yellow spray can. “Ask and ye shall receive.”

  Disassembling the shelves made for an acrobatic enterprise, me wrangling my long body into position to access the rusted rear bolts, while Tatiana hung on with the pliers for dear life. One particular bracket would not move for love or money.

  “Forget it,” I said. “We’ll leave it and do that one instead.”

  She rested on her haunches, shook out her wrists. “I need a break.”

  I backed out on my hands and knees and sat cross-legged on the concrete.

  “I can’t wait for this to be over,” she said. She was staring through the bars of the shelving unit at the trapped boxes. “But it’s sad, too. You know?”

  I thought of her apartment, stripped down to its essentials, the lack of attachments, a reminder to herself that her return to California was supposed to be temporary.

  I said, “You think you’ll move back?”

  She looked at me quizzically.

  “To New York,” I said.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “To dance.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve missed my window.”

  “Come on.”

  “That’s how it is. You get a few good years and then it’s over.”

  “I hear that.”

  “Mm.” A smile. “Look at us. Washed up at thirty.”

  I smiled, too.

  She said, “People ask me what I do and I tell them I dance. That’s what I told you. But I don’t, not often enough to call myself a dancer. I teach dance. I teach yoga. So that makes me a teacher.”

  “Why does it have to be one or the other?”

  “You can call yourself anything you want,” she said. “That doesn’t make it true.”

  “Sure it does,” I said. “This is America.”

  She snorted.

  We fell silent, our breath returning in short, flat echoes that shrank the space surrounding us. Then one of the furnaces roared to life.

  “Holy shit that’s loud,” she said, palming her chest.

  I reached for the screwdriver. “Ready?”

  We got back to work.

  Eventually we loosened the unit enough to toddle it out. I carried the three boxes upstairs. They were badly wrinkled and stank of colonizing fungus. Tatiana told me to leave them in the service porch, out of reach of her sinuses.

  My shirt was dark with sweat, my knee dangerously tight. Sipping on tap water, I followed her to the dining room so she could pour herself another half glass of wine. She was patched under the arms, too, both of us smeared with grime and rust. I needed to sit, to take some weight off my leg, but I didn’t want to soil the nice leather chairs, so I leaned on the table to relieve the strain.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Of course.”

  “You’ve been really kind throughout. Beyond the call.”

  “No big deal,” I said.

  “But it is,” she said. Her voice was raw. “It’s a big thing. A great big thing.”

  I made a gesture of demurral.

  That seemed to anger her. She turned away and gulped her wine and grabbed for the bottle. Then she reconsidered and set it down with a clunk and took two hungry strides toward me, her body sliding against mine as she lifted her face and rose up on her toes.

  It wasn’t going to happen. Not without my help. At six-three, I had a good eight inches on her. I was going to have to become an active and equal participant.

  I did. I bent down, and we met where we could.

  —

  THE KISS DIDN’T last long. I drew back with salt on my tongue.

  She remained pressed against me, her back in a tight, gorgeous arch; peering up at me with those green eyes, her rib cage biting into my stomach, her slight frame bearing down on me with a paralyzing heaviness. She was waiting for me to move, to move back toward her, and when I didn’t, she began searching my face. I could see her taking me apart in her mind, realization dawning, followed by discontent.

  She broke away from me and went for her wine.

  I said, “I don’t want to do the wrong thing here.”

  “What’s the wrong thing?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  She said, “Let me know when you figure it out.”

  She drained her wine and set the glass down hard on the sideboard. She still had her back to me. She put her hands on her hips, kicked at the nearest box, one of many. “Help me, please.”

  CHAPTER 14

  We managed to fit eight of the eleven remaining boxes into the Prius, leaving the three rotted ones behind.

  “Are you okay to drive?” I asked.

  She ignored me and got into her car.

  Sitting in my own car, engine off, I watched her brake lights fade.

  The case was closed, or would be soon, with one click of a mouse. On paper, Tatiana and I would revert to being strangers. That could create opportunities. Or destroy them.

  We’re not a delivery service.

  I started the car, swung a three-point-turn, and eased toward the driveway, cresting the top and immediately jamming on the brake.

  Down at the bottom, a man stood on the sidewalk.

  He was gazing up at Rennert’s house. I couldn’t see his face. The angle was wrong; he was wearing a hoodie, pulled up, and my headlights blew out details, leaving me with no more than a general sense of size and shape.

  He was goddamn enormous.

  That was as much as I could process before he spooked and ran, disappearing behind a hedge.

  I lifted my foot off the brake, rolling to street level.

  The cul-de-sac was deserted.

  I edged forward to peer along Bonaventure Avenue.

  No sign of him.

  I was off duty, unarmed, fatigued.

  I had my couch, my TV, my ice pack.

  Why run?

  Peeping Tom?

  Burglar, casing?

  Someone who pushed people down stairs?

  I deal in facts. I try to be pragmatic. But so much comes down to instinct, a tickle in the brain stem that says This feels wrong.

  Where the hell had he gone?

  The street was the only way out for a vehicle. Then I noticed the sign for a footpath, poking out at the opposite end of the cul-de-sac.

  BONAVENTURE WA
LK.

  I left my car at the curb.

  The path snaked between two of the south-side properties, twisting and dropping. I couldn’t see more than five feet ahead. To my left grew towering bamboo hedges; from behind them came the loud burble of a fountain or pond, the owner’s attempt to block out the sound of pedestrian traffic. It also meant that I couldn’t hear what lay around the bend.

  No one would hear me coming, either.

  I picked up the pace, boots slapping concrete, knee beginning to complain.

  A steep run of crumbling cement stairs fed me into a second cul-de-sac. Less ornate homes, brown shingles and station wagons, funky statuary and overgrown planter boxes.

  I spotted him: a block and a half off, headed toward College Avenue at a rapid clip.

  I followed.

  He glanced back.

  Stiffened.

  Broke into a sprint.

  Definitely wrong.

  I went after him.

  Within ten feet I could feel the mistake in my knee.

  “Sheriff,” I yelled. “Stop.”

  He hooked left down Cherry Street, his receding bulk shored up against banks of moonlight and the icy spillover from living room TVs. For a man his size, he could move. Or maybe it felt that way to me because I was limping like a junker.

  I yelled again for him to stop.

  He raced ahead.

  It’d been a long time since I’d detained anyone, let alone made an arrest. But I’m still a peace officer; I was in uniform, and his failure to heed me amounted to probable cause. Forget whatever hunch had triggered my suspicion. He could be carrying drugs or a weapon. He might have warrants out.

  At Russell he went right, westward again, ducking out of sight.

  I came stumbling around the bend.

  College Avenue was bustling and fragrant, bookstores and cafés doing a brisk nighttime trade. Hipster dads bounced toddlers awake way past their bedtimes. Undergrads in North Face walked with their arms linked. Bursts of laughter and breath-steam.

  Given his height, given mine, I should have been making easy eye contact with him.

  He was nowhere.

  I hitched along, peering into shop windows. People gave me a wide berth. I was sweaty and red and filthy.