by Hart Hanson
Which left me hoping they were in his Tahoe.
First, I satisfied myself that the Tahoe wasn’t in range of any security cameras, though I figured Willeniec was wily or paranoid enough to have chosen this spot with that in mind, given his homicidal intentions. Which meant I could probably count on his not having LoJack.
(I hoped Willeniec was as smart as I was giving him credit for.)
Smarterthanyou, Willeniec rasped.
“Deader than me too,” I muttered.
I pulled on my standard-issue limo-driver leather driving gloves and climbed into Willeniec’s Tahoe.
Nothing on the seats. In fact, nothing in the car at all. Willeniec must have been a clean freak. I wondered if that was a common personality trait for sadists. I checked the glove compartment, and there it was. His notebook. I opened it. There was my name with the curt annotation asshole.
Avila’s address in Calabasas.
The address of the storage unit.
A list of other addresses that looked familiar. One, at least, I remembered from Willeniec’s warrant. An Avila property.
My business card stuck between the pages.
(Take this now and walk away?)
Nope. I was committed (see above observations re: forensics).
I started the Tahoe and drove it home. Up goes the garage door, in drives Skellig, down goes the door, the alley left empty and quiet and cool, the light in the east emanating not from the rising sun but from the car dealerships along Santa Monica Boulevard.
It was still night (and miles to go before I sleep).
Now, here’s the thing about getting rid of five and a half thousand pounds of SUV: it’s not easy. Lucky suggested we drive it out into the desert and set it on fire with Willeniec’s body behind the wheel. Stoned Ripple made fun of Lucky for wanting to place a flaming beacon over a dead body in the middle of nowhere. Ripple advised driving the truck to Tijuana and leaving it on the street with the keys in the ignition, which wasn’t an awful notion. It was Tinkertoy who came up with the golden idea: enforced entropy. Meaning take it apart.
Make it cease to be a Tahoe.
I liked that plan because there are only a few parts of an automobile that can be uniquely identified as a definite part of a specific vehicle using serial numbers, including the VIN. I liked Tinkertoy’s plan even more when she pointed out we weren’t even facing that problem.
When Ripple asked why, Tinkertoy tapped on the front windshield on the driver’s side as though that was explanation enough. When it wasn’t, she read off the VIN number as though that was explanation enough. When it wasn’t, she explained that what she’d just read was the VIN for a 2006 Suburban. When none of us reacted properly to that information, Tinkertoy explained that Willeniec’s vehicle must have been cobbled together in a chop shop, a Frankenstein made up of stolen and chopped vehicles, and, accordingly, just like Frankenstein’s monster, once it was taken apart it wouldn’t be identifiable as a particular, specific vehicle.
“Are you certain?” Lucky asked, meaning, Can it be that easy?
Tinkertoy shut down for a minute, searching for secret messages in Lucky’s simple question before responding, “I’ll check. The drivetrain. And. Transmission but. Yeah.”
All we had to do was spend about six hours reducing the Tahoe to the parts that made up a whole, then a day or two selling off pieces to salvage yards and local mechanics.
Of course it was Ripple who asked (way too eagerly) if we were going to do the same thing to Willeniec’s corpse.
“Take him apart? Piece by piece?”
I looked at my watch.
Three A.M.
I told Lucky, Ripple, and Tinkertoy to get going on dismantling Willeniec’s Tahoe. I told them that I’d take care of Phase 2 myself: getting rid of Willeniec’s body. We’d meet for breakfast at Callahan’s in six hours. If anything went wrong, and the place was swarmed by cops while I was away, all they knew was that I’d brought in a Chevy Tahoe and told them to take it apart. That’s it. They didn’t know where it came from and they didn’t know where I’d gone.
“What Skellig is telling us,” Lucky said, “is that getting rid of this policeman’s murdered corpse is an Irrevocable Step. There is no coming back from that.”
It’s good to have a personal translator.
“Through a glass darkly and down the rabbit hole,” I said.
“Wait. I’d’ve thought crushing the guy’s larynx the actual irrevocable step,” Ripple said, “because that’s what murdered him.”
“Skellig killed him, not us.”
“Don’t rub it in,” Ripple said.
Tinkertoy asked what I was going to do with the remains. Lucky explained that it was better she didn’t know.
Ripple, his voice dulled by pain and cannabis, asked yet again what I was going to do with Willeniec’s body. Patient Lucky reiterated that the less they knew, the better.
“We’ll see you at breakfast.”
I nodded and went to Tinkertoy’s workbench and looked around.
“What do? You need?” Tinkertoy asked, very possessive of her work space.
I didn’t answer.
“Everything from Here On In is Need to Know,” Lucky said.
“Need. To know,” Tinkertoy repeated.
“That’s all Skellig’s stuff anyway,” Ripple said. “Tools. Parts. Everything. None of your business if he wants to take something. It’s his, not yours.”
Bickering. Good. Things were getting back to normal.
By the time I pulled out of the garage in the Transit, Willeniec’s mortal remains hermetically sealed in the back, Lucky, Tinkertoy, and Ripple were busy wreaking entropy upon Willeniec’s Frankenstein chop shop vehicle, Ripple and Tinkertoy moving real slow (like people in pain), but moving.
When one is obliged to dispose of a murdered body, one faces a Gordian knot wrapped around Pandora’s box, which contains Occam’s razor. One can hide the body somewhere and hope it is never discovered, the downside being that most places filling that requirement, like the foundation of a building, a backyard, a crawl space, are also places that preserve the body for long periods of time. The continuing downside being that if the body is found, it’s still identifiable and brimming with clues.
The other option is for one to get rid of the body completely, say, through incineration or dissolving or feeding to wild animals, but that tends to involve a lot of noticeable, dramatic, attention-getting behaviors and/or the need for facilities like giant furnaces or acid baths or shark tanks or dens of hyenas, all of which are mostly the purview of supervillains. Therefore, the best way for an everyman limo driver without criminal connections is to dispose of a body in a place where it will never be found.
Duh, you may say. But we live in a very crowded world. Even if I were to take Willeniec’s body out in a boat, wrap it in chains, and dump it into the Catalina Trench, someone would be watching me on radar, maybe photographing me from a drone or satellites.
All in all, it’s best for society that body disposal is a fraught enterprise because if it weren’t, people might get away with murder (exactly as I intended to do).
I pulled the Transit out onto Santa Monica Boulevard, pointed it east to the interstate, and headed north. Even at four o’clock in the morning, there’s traffic on the 405, though I can’t say how many other vehicles were transporting dead LA County sheriff’s detectives. I turned on KNX 1070 AM—“Southern California’s Only All-News Radio Station”—and cruised over the Sepulveda Pass and across the Ventura Freeway and kept going. Less and less traffic traveling my way but more and more coming toward me, hardworking, honest people who lived out in the Valley and beyond, heading to their jobs, drinking coffee from insulated sports team mugs, and cursing their daily commutes.
Past Mission Hills to North Hills to where 405 joins the Golden State, climbing out of
the Southland basin (holding my breath superstitiously as I passed the LAPD training center), up and up and up through the darkness, I drove five miles per hour over the speed limit, which is the least suspicious speed a man can drive when there’s a corpse in the vehicle.
An hour later I grabbed a Styrofoam cup of acidic, hyperstrong coffee at the McDonald’s in Castaic because it occurred to me that everything I’d done in the last couple of days was extremely fatiguing. I considered popping a Vicodin but figured I should keep all my wits about me and told myself the throbbing pain in my head would keep me sharp. By the time I reached Pyramid Lake, the sky was lightening, which I tried to deny as a figment of my imagination, but no, the mountains were definitely outlined against the eastern horizon. I crested the Tejon Pass, the San Joaquin Valley stretching out in front of me, the lights of Bakersfield in the distance. Daylight was coming too fast, so I risked increasing my speed.
It was five thirty when I exited the 5 at Maricopa Highway and headed west.
My destination was a patch of land near Capitola Park not far past the town of Maricopa.
I’d been there once before with a charity client after an Oilers game at the Staples Center. I was supposed to take him directly back to his room at a seniors’ facility in Bakersfield, but he asked me if I’d mind taking a small detour to what he called his home place, adding that he had liver cancer and was not expected to live long. Would you have said no? (I didn’t think so.)
The old codger’s name was Danny Marler, a small man wearing cardboard-stiff overalls, hunched from a life of hard labor, with giant ears and a weird mop of white hair, crazy eyebrows.
“You don’t mind me saying, Mr. Marler,” I said, “I never met anybody who looks less like a hockey fan.”
Mr. Marler wheezed (which I took for a laugh) and admitted that as long as he’d been living in the senior center, he’d entered every contest that might get him the hell out of his room.
“You’re right, I don’t know nothing about hockey, but I loved that game tonight,” Mr. Marler said. “Loved it!”
Mr. Marler told me his intention was to leave these sixty desiccated acres outside Maricopa to his children, who he hoped would redevelop an interest in what used to be a pretty sweet orchard.
“After the damn drought ends,” he said.
Four years before we met, Mr. Marler had tried to save his tangerine trees by drilling a six-hundred-foot well. It worked for exactly two months before his neighbor, a giant industrial almond company, drilled a thousand feet down.
And that was that for Danny Marler and his beloved tangerine trees and his sixty acres.
His ten-thousand-dollar well drained dry in a matter of minutes.
“Fickle finger of fate,” Mr. Marler said, pointing his own gnarled index finger up at the sky.
Danny Marler capped the well, got cancer, and moved into the senior center in Bakersfield, where he was the hundredth caller to a radio contest to get limo-driven to an Oilers game.
I said something lame to Mr. Marler, nothing more than the usual sympathetic human noise. Mr. Marler wheezed and said he wouldn’t expect me to understand how much he loved this piece of land because I’d never seen it before the drought, supporting him and his wife and a bunch of kids. For forty years, Mr. Marler said he’d felt like Adam doing God’s work in his own private Garden of Eden. If he got to Heaven and it didn’t look exactly like this, he’d be disappointed. We stayed there for an hour, Mr. Marler giving me a tour of a place that looked to be about ready to dry up and blow away.
“Like me,” he joked, making his wheezing sound.
A couple of weeks later, I called Danny Marler up to offer another hockey game on me, and an impatient woman at the hospice told me Mr. Marler had died three days after showing me his desiccated slice of paradise.
My intention was to drop Willeniec’s corpse down Danny Marler’s useless dry well.
To my great relief, Mr. Marler’s faded wooden farmhouse remained boarded up and abandoned and his tangerine trees remained so much vertical firewood.
I trotted around the area Mr. Marler had flapped his hand at in disgust when he told me about his well. By which time I no longer needed my flashlight. I hustled back to the Transit and backed as close as I could get to the wellhead, which was capped by a hatch twenty-four inches across, topped by a bolted-down manhole cover with rocks placed on top. I put on my leather driving gloves, removed the rocks, then used the ratchet wrench and penetrating oil I’d taken from Tinkertoy’s bench to unbolt the hatch. It weighed about two hundred pounds, but at least it wasn’t rusted in place.
When I shifted the hatch, a dank, cool miasma rose from the hole and I stumbled backward with vertigo. I assumed it was my aching head and lack of sleep, but it felt like that six-hundred-foot hole wanted to suck me into it.
I opened the ambulance doors on the Transit and tilted Willeniec’s tarp-shrouded corpse directly into the hole without it ever touching the ground. I heard a shoosh as the body slid down the tube. Lucky for me, Willeniec was not a fat man or particularly wide shouldered, because I heard that sound for long seconds before it finally faded.
I stood over the hole feeling both severe fear of heights and intense claustrophobia, feeling bad that I’d sent the sadistic bastard down headfirst (as though that mattered), and wondered just for a moment if I might be losing my shit. But, like when you’re shooting coyotes, doubt and fear should come before the decision is made, not when the action is taken.
Did I say a prayer for Sheriff’s Detective Willeniec, A.?
No, I did not but, just in case God existed and wasn’t a sadistic superalien, I said one for myself and my people. I prayed that if anyone ever opened this wellhead again, they would simply fill it with rocks or sand and not try to drill deeper for water. I prayed that nobody would even stand here again until after I was long dead. I prayed that if they did find Willeniec’s body they wouldn’t be able to find any evidence tracing it back to me and mine. Then I rebolted the hatch, replaced the rocks, shut the ambulance doors, and drove back out to the road. I shuffled back and forth to the wellhead dragging a branch in case there were tire tracks I couldn’t see, then resolved to replace the tires on the Transit when I got back to Santa Monica just to be sure. I drove through Maricopa without a single person seeing me, smelling the Midway-Sunset Oil Field to the north, and I didn’t stop again until I pulled into Oasis Limo Services and put the Transit onto the lift to remind me to change out the tires.
No sign of Tinkertoy, Lucky, and Ripple, but the Tahoe’s quarter panels leaned against the far wall, like they’d always been there, and the engine was on the same hoist Willeniec had used to suspend Ripple only a few hours before.
Out back I found four tires, a drivetrain, and the frame. What they’d done with the seats I did not know.
I changed my clothes, then dropped the lightweight black suit I’d been wearing for nearly twenty-four hours into the donation bin at the Santa Monica Goodwill along with the leather driving gloves.
It had been five and a half hours nearly to the minute since I’d left, and for most non-murderers the day was just beginning, so I went to join my friends and coworkers at Callahan’s Diner for breakfast.
When I got there, nobody had ordered food. But once I tucked in, starving, one by one the others discovered they could eat as well. We ate without speaking, which was exactly as it should be, in silence, then ordered more coffee, except for Lucky, who likes tea.
I cleared my throat. They all looked at me like I was their leader, like we were a military unit.
Are you aware that a five-star general feels less responsibility than the lowliest second-grade lieutenant facing a platoon of grunts? An admiral doesn’t look sailors in the eye. Go ahead, ask any of the big muck-a-mucks who command thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of troops about his or her toughest command, and you will hear about the first day a newly minte
d junior officer faces thirty individuals.
You know who feels an even greater burden? A noncommissioned officer. We bear an even greater responsibility for the personal well-being of our subordinates because there are maybe eight or fifteen people in a squad and we know them well. Real people. In fact, you could say that officers from generals down to lieutenants have prime objectives designed to get soldiers killed. Sergeants work to keep their people alive. To send them all home.
That’s why being a sergeant is the highest calling available in the military.
(I may be biased.)
“Interesting phenomenon,” I announced.
Lucky reacted to the tone of my voice, relaxing a little because he’s the one who tends to read my mind and so knew whatever I’d been up to had gone as well as could be expected. “Interesting phenomenon a cop once told me,” I continued.
Tinkertoy blew on her coffee and winced, her sore breast giving her pain, maybe even a broken rib grating.
“Crimes, especially murders, are always solved by three things.” I held up three fingers. “One: people talking. Two: evidence at the crime scene. Three: evidence on the body.”
“What about eyewitnesses?” Ripple asked.
“Falls Under the Aegis of finger one,” Lucky said, grabbing my index finger to illustrate. (Again, Afghans display different personal boundaries from your average American male.)
“If nobody talks,” I said, reclaiming my finger, “the crime cannot be solved. If there is no crime scene, the crime cannot be solved. If there is no body, the crime cannot be solved. So, if those three things either don’t exist or can’t be found, you know what you have?”
“Perfect crime?” Ripple was looking green under his stoned smirk. His balls must be aching like Jesus’s right hand.
“No crime at all,” I corrected him. “Like the tree in the forest falling down, it never happened.”
“The Allegory of the Tree Falling does not concern the Fact of the Occurrence,” Lucky corrected me. “It concerns the Fact of the Sound the tree does or does not make when it falls as a Perception of the Occurrence.”