Rage

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “In your world,” he said.

  “Not in yours?”

  “You want to know something?” he said. “If the cops do find whoever shot Rand and the P.D.’s office gets the case, I’d be happy to take it.”

  “Even if the shooter turns out to be Barnett Malley?”

  “If Malley accepted me, I’d do my best to keep his ass out of prison.”

  “Pretty detached,” I said.

  “Survival skills go beyond guns,” said Montez.

  “When you represented Rand, did you sense he was holding back about anything?”

  “He was holding back about everything. Wouldn’t communicate with me, basically he played mute. No matter how many times I told him I was on his side. It could’ve been frustrating but the script had already been written. I never got a chance to bring in my own shrink because of the plea deal. Sure, I would’ve liked to know what was going on in that kid’s head. Which I didn’t get from your report. That was a masterpiece of omission. All you said was that he was stupid.”

  “He wasn’t bright,” I said, “but there was plenty going on in his head. I thought he felt remorse and I said so. I doubt your expert would’ve come up with any profound abstractions.”

  “Just a dumb kid? Bad seed?”

  I said nothing.

  “Yeah, I sensed remorse, too,” he said. “Unlike his compadre. Now that one was a piece of work. Evil little bugger, if Rand hadn’t gotten involved with him, his life could’ve turned out a whole lot different.”

  “Troy was the main killer,” I said. “But Rand admitted hitting Kristal.”

  “Rand was a dumb, passive follower who hooked up with a cold little sociopath. In a trial, I would’ve emphasized the follower angle. But like I said, nothing would’ve mattered.”

  “The script.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Who wrote it?”

  “The system,” he said. “You don’t murder a cute little white kid and walk away.” His hand brushed over his butter knife. Adjusted the angle of the handle. “Weider claimed she wanted to mount a team defense. I was so green I bought it. That tells you something about the system, doesn’t it? One year out of law school and Rand got me as his one-man army.” He waved a finger. “Justice for all.”

  “Why’d she change her mind?”

  “Because all she wanted to do was pump me for information. Once we got to court, she was going to pull a switcheroo and dump all over my client. Her prelim motions emphasized Rand’s size and strength, she had all this expert research data showing low I.Q. sociopaths were more likely to turn violent. If it had gone to trial, Turner would’ve been morphed into some frail little dupe who’d been physically intimidated by Rand. Anyway, we were spared all that. The case went down easy.”

  “Not for the Malleys,” I said.

  He showed me his palm. “I can’t think in those terms. And if Barnett Malley doesn’t understand that, I’m ready for him. Nice seeing you again, Doctor.”

  I stood and asked if he knew where I could find Sydney Weider.

  “Going to warn her, too?”

  “And pump her for info.”

  Montez pulled out a pair of sunglasses, held the lenses up and used them as mirrors. One end of his bow tie had drooped lower than its counterpart. He frowned and righted it.

  “You can probably find her,” he said, “on the tennis court or the golf course or sipping a Cosmopolitan on the country club terrace.”

  “Which country club?”

  “I was speaking metaphorically. I have no idea if she belongs to any club but it wouldn’t surprise me. Sydney was rich then, so she’s probably richer now.”

  “Rich girl playing at the law?” I said.

  “Good insight, you must be a psychologist. The first time you met Sydney she’d be sure to let you know where she was coming from. Swinging the Gucci purse, letting drop all the relevant data in machine-gun monologue. Like you were a student and she was teaching Introductory Sydney.”

  “She talked about her money?”

  “About her daddy the film honcho, her husband the film honcho, all the industry parties she was ‘compelled’ to attend. The sons at Harvard-Westlake, the house in Brentwood, the weekend place in Malibu, the Beemer and the Porsche on alternate days.” He mimed a finger-down-the throat gag.

  “When did she leave the P.D.’s office?” I said.

  “Not long after the Malley case closed, as a matter of fact.”

  “How soon after?”

  “Maybe a month, I don’t know.”

  “Think it had anything to do with the case?”

  “Maybe indirectly. Her name got into the paper and soon after she got a fat private practice offer from Stavros Menas.”

  “Mouthpiece of the high and mighty,” I said.

  “You’ve got that right. What Menas does is more P.R. than criminal defense. Which makes him the perfect L.A. guy. He alternates between a Bentley and an Aston Martin.”

  “Does she still work for him? She’s got no office listing.”

  “That’s ’cause she never worked for him,” he said. “The way I heard it, she changed her mind and retired to a life of leisure.”

  “Why?”

  He glanced down at his food. “Couldn’t tell you.”

  “Burnout?”

  “Sydney didn’t feel deeply enough to burn out. She probably just got bored. With all her money there was no reason for her put up with all the shit. When I first heard she quit, I figured she was going to try to get a movie deal out of the case. But it didn’t happen.”

  “You figured because her husband’s a film exec?”

  “Because she’s like that. Manipulative, out for herself. She’d fly to Aspen for the weekend on a private jet, be at work Monday in a Chanel suit and try to sound convincing about fighting for justice for some dude from Compton. By lunchtime, she’d be dropping names about who sat next to her at The Palm.” He laughed. “I’d like to think she’s not real happy, but she probably is.”

  “Did you hear any specific rumors about a movie deal?” I said.

  “I do know that she wrangled to get the case.”

  “How?”

  “By kissing up to the boss. The way it works at the P.D. is whoever’s top of the list gets the next client. Unless the boss handpicks someone for a specific case. I know for a fact that Sydney wasn’t next up on Troy Turner because the guy who was told me he’d been bumped. He wasn’t bitching, he had no stomach for high-profile bullshit. The way he phrased it was ‘The bitch did me a favor.’ ”

  “Was she qualified?”

  Montez clicked his teeth together. “I’d like to say no, but yeah, she was smart enough. By that time she had three, four years under her belt and her win-loss record was as good as anyone’s.”

  “Three or four years out of school?” I said. “I remember her as older.”

  “She was older. After she passed the bar she got married, did the mommy bit, waited until the kids were older.” He wiped his mouth and folded his napkin. “When you see her, give my regards.”

  “I will.”

  “I was kidding.”

  * * *

  I phoned Milo’s desk from the car. He was out and I asked for Detective Binchy.

  Sean said, “Hey, Dr. Delaware.”

  “Could you get me an unlisted address?”

  “I don’t know, Doc, it’s kind of against regulations.”

  “Milo asked me to talk to this person, so in a sense I’m a police surrogate.”

  “A surrogate . . . okay. I guess. You’re not going to shoot anyone, are you?”

  “Not unless they piss me off.”

  Silence.

  He said, “Ha. Okay, hold on.”

  Lauritz Montez’s rant about Sydney Weider’s lifestyle had cited houses in Brentwood and Malibu but maybe that had been metaphorical, too. Or, she’d defied his rich-get-richer expectations and downsized.

  Her listed residence was a smallish, single-story ranch house on
La Cumbre Del Mar, on the western edge of Pacific Palisades. Sunny street cooled by Pacific currents, seven-figure ocean view, but by no means palatial. Splintering redwood siding striped the white stucco front. Half-dead sago palms and droopy ferns backed a flat lawn spiked with crabgrass. A shaggy old blue-leafed eucalyptus created gray litter on the grass. The driveway was occupied by a dented, gray Nissan Pathfinder filthy with gull shit.

  As I walked to the door, I could smell the Pacific, hear the slow breathing of rustling tide. No one answered my knock or two bell pushes. A young woman across the street opened her door and observed me. When I faced her, she went back inside.

  I waited awhile longer, took out a business card, wrote a note on the back asking Sydney Weider to call me, and dropped it in the mail slot. As I returned to my car, she came walking up the block.

  She had on green sweats and white sneakers and dark glasses, walked with a stiff gait that threw her hip out at an odd angle. Her hair was chopped short and she’d let it go white. She was still thin but her body looked soft and loose-jointed and ungainly.

  I stepped out to the breezeway in front of her house. She saw me and stopped short.

  I waved.

  She didn’t react.

  I stepped toward her and smiled. She thrust her arms in front of her torso in a sad, useless defensive move. Like someone who’d seen too many martial arts movies.

  “Ms. Weider— ”

  “What do you want?” Her lawyer’s voice was gone, tightened by fear-laden shrillness.

  “Alex Delaware. I worked on the Malley— ”

  “Who are you?”

  I repeated my name.

  She stepped closer. Her lips fluttered and her chin quaked. “Go away!”

  “Could we just talk for a minute? Rand Duchay’s been murdered. I’m working with the police on the case and if you could spare— ”

  “A minute about what?” Ratatat.

  “Who might’ve killed Rand. He was shot last— ”

  “How would I know?” she yelled.

  “Ms. Weider,” I said, “I don’t want to alarm you, but it might involve your personal safety.”

  She clawed the air with one hand. The other was balled tight, flat against her flank. “What are you talking about? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “It’s possible— ”

  “Go away go the fuck away!” Shaking her head frantically, as if ridding it of noise.

  “Ms. Weider— ”

  Her mouth gaped. No sound for a second, then she was screaming.

  A gull harmonized. The same neighbor from across the street stepped out.

  Sydney Weider screamed louder.

  I left.

  CHAPTER 25

  The haunted look in Sydney Weider’s eyes stayed with me during the drive back home.

  I went to my office and played Search Engine Poker. Thirty hits came up for “Sydney Weider” but only one was related to her work on People v. Turner and Duchay. A paragraph in the Western Legal Journal, dated a month prior to the final hearing, speculating about the ramifications for juvenile justice.

  Weider had been quoted predicting there’d be plenty of “ground-breaking consequences.” No words of wisdom from Lauritz Montez. Either he’d declined to comment or no one had asked his opinion.

  The remaining citations preceded Weider’s assignment to the P.D. by years. An obituary for Weider’s father listed him as Gunnar Weider, a producer of low-budget horror flicks and, later, episodic TV. Sydney was listed as his only survivor and as the wife of Martin Boestling, a CAA film agent.

  The Times used to run a social page before political correctness took over. I logged onto the archives and found notice, twenty-eight years ago, of the Weider-Boestling nuptials. The Beverly Hills Hotel, Sydney had been twenty-three, her groom, two years older. Big wedding, lots of Faces in attendance.

  I plugged in Boestling’s name. A few years after marrying Sydney he had left CAA for ICM, then William Morris. After that, he took a business affairs post at Miramax, where he’d stayed until a year before the Malley murder, when he resigned to start MBP Ltd., his own production company.

  According to the press release in Variety, the new firm’s emphasis would be on “quality, moderately budgeted feature films.” The only MBP credits I could find were three made-for-TV cheapies, including a remake of a sitcom that had been stale in its first incarnation.

  Lauritz Montez had talked about a script. Had there been a real one and had Boestling gone out on his own to peddle it?

  To my mind, the Malley case had nothing to offer cinematically— no happy ending, no redemption, no character development— but what did I know?

  Maybe it would’ve worked as a quickie cable stinker. I searched some more. As far as I could tell, no one, Martin Boestling included, had done the project.

  The other hits were mentions of Sydney and Martin at fund-raisers for the predictable causes: Santa Monica Mountains Conservation League, Save the Bay, The Women’s Wellness Place, Citizen’s Initiative for Gun Control, The Greater L.A. Zoo Association.

  The single photo I found showed the couple at a Women’s Wellness benefit. Weider looked the way I remembered her from eight years ago: sleek, blond, haute coutured. Martin Boestling was dark, stocky, pitched forward like an attack dog.

  She’d always been a fast talker but now her cool, deliberative demeanor had given way to manic speech patterns and ragged fear. From private jets and a Porsche/Beemer combo to a bird-splotched Nissan.

  Did only one car in the driveway mean Boestling was away at work? Or was Weider living alone?

  I phoned Binchy. Now he was out, but Milo was in.

  I recounted the talk with Montez, the welcome I’d received from Weider, her house, her car.

  “Sounds like an unhappy woman,” he said.

  “Jumpy woman and I made her jumpier. Scared the hell out of her.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t want to be reminded of her former life. Getting poorer can do that to you. Not that I’m weeping, she’s still living in the Palisades.”

  I said, “Can you find out if she and Boestling split up?”

  “Why?”

  “Her getting poorer. And I got the feeling she lived alone.”

  “So?”

  “Her reaction was bizarre.”

  “Hold on.” He went off the line, came back several minutes later.

  “Yeah, they’re divorced. Filed seven years ago and closed three years after that. That’s as much as I can get without driving downtown. Three years of drawn-out legal battle couldn’t be fun and maybe she didn’t get what she wanted. Now here’s my show-and-tell: Went over to Nestor Almedeira’s dump on Shatto. All the roaches you can stomp. Like Krug said, no one remembers Nestor ever existing. After some prodding, the clerk thought maybe Nestor sometimes hung out with another junkie named Spanky, but he had no idea what Spanky’s real name was. Male white, twenty-five to forty-five, tall, dark hair and mustache. Possibly.”

  “Possibly?”

  “The hair coulda been dark blond or maybe reddish or reddish brown. The mustache coulda been a beard. Clerk’s about five-two, so I’m figuring anyone would look tall to him. At eight a.m. his breath reeked of booze, so don’t buy stock on his advice. Nestor’s belongings are nowhere to be found. I asked around about Krug and he’s got a rep as a lazy guy. I’d bet he never bothered to go through Nestor’s treasures, gave the other junkies in the place time to do the vulture bit on Nestor’s dope kit, whatever else they figured they could use or sell. The rest probably got tossed.”

  “Including Troy Turner’s prison I.D.,” I said. “No street value in that. Or maybe Nestor carried it on him and the killer took it as a souvenir.”

  “If the motive was hushing Nestor, that’s a real good bet. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could get a warrant for Cowboy Barnett’s cabin and the damn thing’s sitting in a drawer? Next item: Jane Hannabee. Central can’t seem to find her murder book, one of the D’s who worked the case is dea
d and the other moved to Portland, Oregon. I’m waiting for his callback. I did manage to locate the coroner’s report on Hannabee, they’re supposed to be faxing it any minute. Last but not least, I background-checked the old stunt gal, Bunny MacIntyre. She’s an upright citizen, has owned the campsite for twenty-four years. Anyway, that’s my life. Suggestions?”

  “With no dramatic leads, I’d follow up on Sydney Weider.”