—
KEN BASCOMBE HAD retired to Crockett, a waterfront enclave north of Richmond. For not much money, you could get a neat little condo with bay views—not San Francisco Bay, granted, and you had to overlook the refinery. But to a lot of ex-cops, some water is better than no water. I know guys who have dumped their life savings into a boat or a beach cottage, when really what they need is ten years of therapy.
Still, as far as coping mechanisms go, almost anything beats liquor.
Bascombe answered the door with highball in hand. Meaty, with a seamed, sunburnt face and a good head of hair, some gray but mostly brown. His arms were thick; bowling pin legs stuck out from cargo shorts. “Yeah?”
“I’m Clay Edison,” I said.
He squeezed the doorframe. A gold bracelet swung on his left wrist, links rattling.
“You said I could swing by today,” I said.
He hadn’t meant it. Or hadn’t expected me to show.
He wobbled, turned, and went inside, leaving the door open.
The theme was tourist-trap nautical: rope and lanterns, a bar cart fashioned from two ship’s wheels. He pointed me toward the sofa and fell into a La-Z-Boy.
His expression never changed as I spoke. When I gave him a printout of the email from Li Hsieh, he scanned it impassively, reaching the end far too quickly to have read it.
I said, “I can’t prove she’s talking about Linstad. But overall, it’s a good fit. He worked with Donna. She assisted him on the study. She matches his preferred physical type.”
Hard to say which of us was more uncomfortable. I’d figured it would be an easier conversation in person, but that meant having to look him in the eye. Ask him to consider the possibility that he’d stumbled during the most significant case of his career.
He wasn’t looking me in the eye.
He was looking anywhere but at me.
He folded the page in half and waggled it between two loose fingers. “I’m waiting for the part where you tell me why any of this matters a shit.”
“I got in touch with one of the women Linstad messed around with,” I said, retrieving it and returning to my place on the sofa. “Tammy Wong. She said Linstad once went at her, physically. Held her against a wall and got up in her face. I haven’t heard back from the other two, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they said something similar.”
Bascombe said nothing.
“If so, it feels like a pattern.”
“Big if.”
“Right, but…Let’s just, for a minute, take it as a framework.”
“Framework,” he said.
“Say Linstad is sleeping with Donna Zhao.”
Bascombe yawned, didn’t bother to cover his mouth. “You wanna say that, say that.”
“Something happens between them. He dumps her, she gets mad, starts making noise, threatening to tell his wife.”
Bascombe waved a finger like a conductor’s baton. The music goes on. Yawn.
I said, “Nineteen ninety-three, Linstad and Olivia have been married less than two years. Their prenup says he doesn’t get anything till year three.”
“So.”
“That’s motive for him to want to shut Donna up.”
Bascombe raked the chair arm upholstery, as if trying to quash an unpleasant urge. “You are one creative guy, Tommy Ed.”
“I know it’s not a lot to go on that’s concrete—”
“It’s nothing concrete,” he said. “Don’t let me stop you, though, I’m finding it really entertaining.”
“Linstad puts himself at the scene,” I said.
“As a witness.”
“Okay, but what’s he doing there to begin with? His office is across campus. He lives in Piedmont. He’s spending nights at the duplex, which is in the opposite direction. There’s no reason for him to be on foot anywhere near her apartment. Why’s he there?”
“Ask him.”
“I can’t,” I said. “He’s dead.”
“Yup,” Bascombe said. “You said it.”
“Did you consider him as anything other than a witness? At any point?”
“Sure I did,” he said. “You think I’m a fuckin idiot? It don’t mean shit, because we have a print and a confession. So unless you can explain that I got nothing to say to you.”
He finished his drink, heaved himself up out of the chair, went over to the bar cart, and uncorked a bottle of Wild Turkey. He poured, plodded back to the recliner. His drink sloshed as he sat down. He licked the spillage off his thumb.
“Triplett was vulnerable,” I said, drawing a smirk from Bascombe. “He’s young. He’s suggestible and unstable. Linstad had to be aware of that; he screened Triplett for the study. There’s a report—I emailed you copies of a few pages.”
“I saw.”
“Then you know: the two of them had this weird relationship. Triplett flunks the screening procedure, Linstad goes, ‘No thanks, see you later.’ Then all of a sudden he changes his mind and enrolls him.”
“Cause he felt bad for him.”
“Maybe. Or maybe he realizes, Wait a second, this kid could be useful. He starts buying him food, taking him out. He’s grooming him.”
“Brainwashing. Just like on TV. I love it.”
“Maybe Triplett acted alone,” I said. “Maybe he and Linstad did it together.”
“Hmm,” Bascombe said. “Did you check out Lee Harvey Oswald?”
“Maybe Triplett was home that night, like his sister says, and he was nowhere near the scene and Linstad acted alone.”
“You love that word maybe.”
“You don’t think Triplett’s confession comes across as confused?”
“Of course it does. He’s fucking crazy.”
“You ask him, after he stabbed her, what happened? He says: ‘She like disappeared.’ You tell him come on, be serious, what are you talking about, she disappeared? You know what he says?”
“Please, tell me.”
“ ‘Like in the air.’ ” I looked at him. “In the air.”
He stared at me: Who the fuck cares.
“The study had the kids playing a video game,” I said. “I checked it out. The way it works is, you kill people, they break into pieces and dissolve into the air. It’s possible, right, that Triplett’s imagining that? What’s that mean, ‘in the air’?”
“It means,” Bascombe said, his voice dangerously soft, “jack shit.”
Silence.
I said, “I know this case is important to you.”
“Shut up,” he said. “All right? You had your turn. Now shut the fuck up and listen.”
He leaned over to set his glass on the carpet, coming back up red in the face, busted capillaries etching the flesh of his nose.
He said, “This is finished. It’s dead. Understand?”
“I’m thinking about the family,” I said.
“You arrogant goddamn muppet, I told you to shut up.” He sputtered a laugh. “You’re thinking about the family? All right. Let’s ‘think about the family.’ When I think about the family, it’s that they’ve had twenty-four years to come to terms with what happened to their daughter, their only child, which—if you had a shred of real-world experience whatsoever, which you don’t, you sad fucking wannabe—then you’d know that it’s not nearly enough. The fuck you know? You don’t deal with alive people. You’re a vulture. You go through pockets. But I can promise you one thing: dragging them back into it will do nothing, nothing, to ‘help’ them. You want to help them? Shut up. Everything you’re saying, all this garbage you’re spewing, even if it was true, accomplishes nothing. There’s nothing to accomplish. One guy is out of prison, the other guy is dead. Not to mention everything you’re saying is a hypothetical load of shit.”
He smiled. “I’ve tried to be patient with you. I let you call me on the phone, come to my house, where I live, waste my time, tell me this that the other, make up stories about people you don’t know and never met, and then I’m supposed to give you a pat on the
back?”
He leaned over, feeling around for the glass. “We’re gonna be good boys and do our jobs. I already did mine. I put that fuckin animal in jail. Now I get to have fun. You seem a little unclear about yours, so I’ll review it for you again: shut up. Go back to being a maid. Unless you’re as terrible at that as you are at police work, in which case, my recommendation is, go out and find a job more suited to your skill set. Try clowning.”
He found the glass, pushed himself to his feet, headed to the bar cart.
I said, “Linstad’s ex-father-in-law is John Sowards.”
He froze, thick shoulders bunched. “Jesus fucking Christ, you’re still talking.”
“He’s worth about half a billion dollars. There’s one business partner he’s done several deals with. Dave Auerbach. He used to be a UC regent. Dave is short for S. Davis. That’s him, on the committee that throws Linstad under the bus. The lawyer, Khoury? She’s from the Sowards family firm.”
Bascombe kept his back to me as he poured more Wild Turkey.
I stood up. “The report comes out right around when Olivia and Nicholas’s marriage hit the rocks. You’d think Sowards would have no reason to protect Linstad. Quite the contrary. Let the bastard burn. But the big rich think differently, right? Reputation is everything. Their daughter marries a murderer, they get tainted by association.”
Bascombe recorked the bottle.
“I spoke to the coroner who handled Linstad’s death. He told me his boss was leaning on him to close the case quickly and quietly. I’m figuring Sowards got spooked. He may’ve even suspected his daughter had something to do with it. So he circled the wagons.”
Bascombe faced me. Red gone to purple.
He extruded words, like a machine making sausage links. “Never. In my. Career. Did I. Let anyone. Influence. Me.”
“I’m not saying you did,” I said.
The room was small, and, drunk as he was, he covered the distance with impressive speed. Barely enough time for me to see him cock a fist back, the bracelet jangling, the big hairy right forearm swinging in a shallow, sideways arc.
What’s true for a free throw is true for a punch: the flatter the trajectory, the more accurate it has to be. Try to club me over the head but miss, you still might break my collarbone. Aim straight for my nose and your margin of error shrinks. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it was what I was thinking as I juked to the left and Bascombe’s momentum carried him past me and into a bookcase.
Kitschy piece, shaped like a canoe with the bottom third chopped off so it stood upright. A few books, mostly knickknacks: brass compass, ship-in-a-bottle, autographed baseball on a plastic stand. All of which came raining down as the bookcase slammed back and then pitched forward, leaving a moon-shaped cleft in the drywall.
Bascombe tangled with a floor lamp, which went down, the bulb blowing out with a pop. He came to rest in a deep one-legged squat against the wall, arms flung out, fingers spread and palms flattened, as though he’d been shot from a cannon. A Tom Clancy paperback lay at his feet.
His wrist was bleeding. I put out a hand to help him up.
He slapped it away, struggled up, and lurched toward the back of the house, swallowed up by the unlit hallway.
A door slammed.
I put the canoe-case back where it belonged. The baseball had a Giants logo; the signature was Willie McCovey’s. The ship-in-a-bottle was toast. The glass hadn’t broken, but the insides had collapsed into a slurry of matchsticks and fabric. I set it on an end table and saw myself out.
CHAPTER 32
“I don’t blame him,” Shupfer said.
She swung the van around and began backing up toward the intake bay. “You got into his personal space and accused him of being on the take.”
“I was careful not to say that.”
“I’m sure he totally appreciated the distinction.”
“Somebody took a statement from Triplett’s sister,” I said. “What happened to it?”
“I’m gonna go with ‘garden-variety incompetence,’ ” she said.
She jammed the gearshift into park and noted the mileage, and we got out to unload the latest decedent. Seventy-nine-year-old Hispanic woman found in the bath by her caretaker. We hadn’t noted any obvious signs of elder abuse, but the location of the body warranted bringing her in.
“Forget Bascombe getting paid off,” I said, unlocking the gurney wheels. “It doesn’t have to be that overt. It could be much subtler—like what Ming felt. Linstad cooks up his story. He tells his wife he’s going to the police, give a statement. She freaks out, calls her father. He freaks out, calls his lawyer, and so on and so forth, up the chain, until the message trickles back down to Bascombe: ‘Handle with care.’ Now, in his mind, he’s no longer talking to a potential suspect. He’s talking to a helpful witness with important friends. Anyone would start to see the situation through that lens.”
“What about you?” she said. “What lens are you seeing it through?”
We wheeled the body over to the scale. I switched it on and saw Shupfer raise her eyebrows. The dead woman weighed just eighty-one pounds.
“You ask the caretaker about her nutrition?” Shupfer asked.
“She said she ate okay. I saw a box of Ensure in the pantry. Couple cans missing.”
“Mm. Could still be FS.”
Frailty Syndrome. Old bodies deteriorating, the damage hastened by neglect and sometimes worse. A memo had directed us, last year, to look for it.
We rolled the gurney into the intake bay. While Shupfer scribbled on the clipboard, I began unwrapping the body. The old woman was already naked—her skin waxy and shrunken—saving us the trouble of having to undress her and catalog her clothing.
I picked up the camera, began taking flicks. “You’re right, though.”
“Am I now.”
“Bascombe. I shouldn’t have gone there,” I said. “No reason to think he’d cooperate.”
“Yup.”
“Anyway I don’t have enough.”
“Nope.”
“But he just—he pissed me off, Shoops. Super-smug.”
She stopped writing. “Just be glad he didn’t hurt you, princess.”
—
SHE SPOKE TOO soon.
Entering the squad room, wringing out wet hands, I proceeded down the corridor past the sergeants’ offices. Vitti’s door was propped, the man himself slumped over his desk like he’d been sucker-punched. He saw me and sat up, curled a finger, telling me to shut the door and close the blinds.
“If this is about trading for Odell Beckham, Junior,” I said, sitting down, “forget it.”
He ran a hand back and forth over his scalp. “I just got off the phone with Chief Ames at Berkeley PD.”
“Okay.”
“Any guesses why he’s calling me?”
“No sir.”
“None at all?”
“Sir?”
Vitti said, “Have you been harassing one of their guys?”
I said, “Sir?”
“Have you?”
“No sir. I haven’t.”
“Did you go over to some guy’s house?”
“With permission,” I said. “I didn’t show up out of the blue.”
“But you did go to see him.”
“I spoke to him, yeah.”
Vitti’s eyes went to slits. “God’s sake, what were you thinking?”
“I was thinking he and I could have a civilized conversation.”
“The guy’s retired. With health issues, I might add.”
“That’s what he said? I’m harassing him?”
“It’s a little worse than that, actually. He said you took a swing at him.”
“I—? Sorry, sir. That’s bullshit. He came at me. All I did was avoid him.”
Vitti sighed and began fiddling with his Word-A-Day desk calendar—part of his relentless, half-assed pursuit of self-improvement. “What the hell are you into?”
“One of my cases,” I said
, “led me to one of his cases. I did due diligence and noticed parts of Bascombe’s report don’t add up. So I went over there to get clarification.”
“How’s that lead to him hitting you?”
“He didn’t hit me,” I said. “He missed, cause he was drunk off his ass.”
“Christ, Clay, don’t pick nits. How does Bascombe’s case impact yours?”
“It doesn’t, directly. But—”
“Jesus.”
I said, “We’re still cops, sir.”
“There are cops whose job it is to deal with things like that and we’re not them.”
“I don’t see anyone else volunteering.”
“Did you bother to ask?”
“No one seems interested, sir. And I know when someone’s screwed up.”
“Ames doesn’t see it that way,” he said. “He told me the guy’s a decorated veteran.”
“Veterans make mistakes.”
“I don’t care,” Vitti said. “All right? I do not care. What I—what we—have to worry about is relationships. We gotta work with these people. Not just today. Every single day. People, agencies, they rely on us. They need to know that when we show up we’re there to handle our business, and nothing else. I can’t have you running around stirring up shit.”
He paused. “Is everything good with you?”
“Sir?”
“Is there something in your life going on I need to know about?”
Was he really going to do this? Play Papa Bear? “No sir.”
“You can tell me,” he said. “We look after each other, that’s how we do around here. You are an important member of this team.”
What supermarket checkout aisle management handbook had he picked up? “I appreciate that, sir.”
“I checked your logs. You worked Thanksgiving.”
“Yes sir.”
“You’re signed up to work Christmas.”
“Yes sir, I am.”
“You worked Christmas last year,” he said. “Year before that, too. I checked.”
He waited for an explanation.
I said, “I don’t believe in Santa Claus.”
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