by Tyler Dilts
Jen nodded, and I said, “I see,” as if what he had just said had actually explained something. We could have pushed some more, but we knew Tropov would be able to keep it up as long as he wanted to.
“We need to ask you about an employee of yours,” I said.
“Of course,” he said, his voice rich with concern.
Jen began. “What can you tell us about Oleksander Turchenko?”
He took a deep breath and lowered his eyes to his desk, as if he were remembering the loss of a favorite puppy. “I have heard something about his trouble. He was arrested, yes?”
I nodded.
“This is a great disappointment. I do not know Oleksander well, but he is a distant relative. I hired him at the request of my uncle, as a personal favor. To find out he is charged in such a horrible crime is a great shock to me and my family.”
“I’m sure it is,” I said.
Jen asked, “What kind of work did he do for you?”
“He was a freight handler and occasional driver.”
“And he worked here full time?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” Tropov said. “We have only three full-time employees. Myself, my secretary, and one driver. Most of the people who work for us are temporary contract employees.”
“And that’s what Turchenko is?”
“Yes,” Tropov said. “Rather, what he was. I’m afraid it’s unlikely we’ll be able to employ him again.”
“Well,” I said, “he is innocent until proven guilty. What if he’s not convicted of the charges?”
“If that is the case, there is a possibility. But appearances are very important in my business. People’s judgments and opinions have a great impact on our concerns. The perceptions of him, unfortunately, may be too much to overcome. I’m sure you understand.”
“That would be a shame,” Jen said.
“Yes,” Tropov said, “it would.”
“Would you be able to tell us if he was working for you on the evening of”—I paused and pretended to consult my notebook—“February twenty-first?”
“Of course,” he said. He swiveled his desk chair, punched some keys, and pretended to consult his computer files. “No, he was not working for us that night. I wish he had been. My uncle would be much happier if he had been.”
“I think that’s everything.” I looked at Jen, and she agreed. “Thank you very much for your help, Mr. Tropov.”
“You are most welcome,” he said as we all stood up. “Let me show you out.” He led us back onto the asphalt lot. “Please let me know if I can be of any more help to you.”
“We will,” Jen said. “Thanks again.”
We stood there and looked at him until he blinked at the bright sun, turned, and went back inside.
In the car, as she turned back out onto Eleventh Street, Jen said, “That was fun and all, but did we get anything we could use?”
“Oh yeah.”
“What?”
“We know Tropov’s the brains.”
“Think he’s in this?”
“He’s in something.” I looked out the passenger-side window at the colossal cranes along the water’s edge. Docked at the closest of them was a giant freighter with dirty red-and-blue containers stacked ten high on its deck. They made me and the tightening muscles in my neck feel very small.
When we got back to the squad room, I went through my voice mail messages and, surprisingly, found one from Julian Campos. “Mr. Beckett,” he said, deliberately using “mister” rather than “detective” in what I was sure was an attempt to irritate me. He might have been a good lawyer, but he was out of his league when it came to trading petty, thinly veiled, passive-aggressive insults. “If you can clear some time in your schedule today, Bradley Benton is prepared to speak briefly with you and Detective Tanaka. Please call me back to make the arrangements.”
I said to Jen, “We got our interview.”
She looked surprised and a bit wary. We both wondered what angle Campos was playing. The possibility that he was just doing his best to assist us in our investigation never occurred to us.
Bradley hadn’t been home since the murders. He was still staying with his parents.
The Benton family had a knack for finding expensive neighborhoods in Long Beach. The congressman and his wife lived in one of the most exclusive areas of the city—Park Estates. It was a relatively small enclave hidden between the Recreation Park Golf Course and the Veterans Administration hospital on Bellflower. Driving past on one of the major streets around the community, you’d never actually know it was there. But once you went looking for it and started winding through the heart of the area, it felt like you’d taken a wrong turn and somehow wound up thirty miles north in Bel Air or Beverly Hills. It was one of the few places in the city where you could find an actual estate.
Which was exactly what the congressman had found about fifteen years ago, when he’d moved up the coast from Newport Beach to a location that was right in the geographic center of his district.
Before we left the squad, we looked up the residence on Google Earth. I’d already seen it from the street, but I wanted to see it from above to get a better feel for the place. It was quite a spread. It appeared that there were only two properties on the entire block. It had to be two acres. Maybe more. There were large expanses of green lawns, trees, garden areas, tennis and basketball courts, and a pool that looked to be about twice the square footage of my two-bedroom duplex.
“How much do you suppose you need to make to afford a place like that?” Jen asked.
“A United States congressional representative makes one hundred seventy-four thousand dollars a year,” I said.
“How long have you been waiting for the chance to drop that number into a conversation?”
“Looked it up the first night.”
“I figured.” She took an obvious satisfaction in the moment.
“Not enough for that kind of spread, though. Where do you suppose the money comes from?”
“I don’t know,” she said, serious again after her moment of lightness. “But we should find out.”
Patrick had put together a file on Bradley Benton III for us. As I had suspected he would, he’d gotten a lot further online than I had. He’d used LexisNexis and Google and half a dozen other search engines and databases to build a history of the congressman’s son. I went over it with Jen as she drove us to the congressman’s estate.
After spending most of his early education in private school, Bradley transferred to the public Newport Harbor High School, where he’d been a big success. He was on an academic decathlon team that made it to the national finals. After he graduated at the top of his class, he went to his father’s alma mater, Stanford, and stayed there all the way through law school. He’d made a splash there, too. There was a list of accomplishments in the file that included things like editing the law review and inclusion on the dean’s list and a student award from the American Bar Association. Either there weren’t any blemishes at all in his academic record or he’d managed to erase them. I was betting on the second. After he graduated, he went to work for Sternow & Byrne. Patrick added a parenthetical here for us: This is the same firm that represents his father. So Julian Campos was probably more than just the family’s attorney. That explained why he seemed to be as much a babysitter to Bradley as he was a legal representative.
The last entries in the file were bits and pieces from news reports that seemed to deal mostly with the congressman. Brad was mentioned here and there as a potential successor or even a candidate for another congressional district. The term heir apparent came up eight times, according to another note from Patrick.
It all added up to a tidy and spotless personal history.
“You think he could really be that spotless?” Jen asked when I’d finished running it down for her.
“Nobody’s that clean.”
When we stopped the unmarked department cruiser at the gate of the Bentons’ estate and rolled down the driver�
��s side window, we didn’t even have to press a button on the speaker. A disembodied voice said, “Yes?”; and I answered by identifying myself and Jen and telling whoever was on the other end of the intercom that we had an appointment to see Bradley Benton III. The voice didn’t say anything else, but the custom antiqued iron gate split up the center and the two halves floated inward. We curved along the driveway to the large house and parked behind a row of expensive cars.
“DMV says Bradley drives a Porsche,” I said, eyeing the sleek black German car at the head of the line. “Maybe that Panera’s his.”
“That what?” Jen said.
“Panera. That’s what they call that model.”
“No, they call it the Panamera.”
“That’s what I said.”
“You said Panera.”
“Well, that’s something, right? Panera? What is that?”
“It’s that place we had lunch last week in Lakewood.”
“Which one?”
“You called it ‘Starbucks for bread.’”
“That chili was good.”
As we walked toward the large front porch, I wondered what the style of the house was called. It was huge and looked vaguely Mediterranean, but it also had the distinct stamp of new construction, or at least of recent remodeling. There was a lot of stonework and ornate detailing, and it was painted half a dozen different shades of brown. The more I looked at it, the more I guessed it was a contemporary rendering of classic architectural details. No matter what it was in terms of style, though, I got the most important message that the building conveyed loudly and clearly to the kind of people who parked government cars in the driveway. The house might as well have had a YOU ARE BENEATH US sign planted in the lawn.
Before we could locate the bell, the dark wooden door swung open and Julian Campos appeared.
“Hello, Detectives,” he said. “I trust you’re well this morning.”
“Yes, we are,” Jen said, matching his smile watt for watt. “How are you?”
“I’m fine, thank you, Detective Tanaka.” He let his smile fade and said, “I wish I could say the same for Mr. Benton. He is still struggling a great deal.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Jen said. “We’ll make it as easy as we possibly can under the circumstances.”
“I’m sure the family will appreciate that, Detective. Please,” he said, “this way.”
He led us through a larger foyer, past a formal dining room, and into a conspicuously informal great room with a long wall of windows and French doors that looked out into a yard that seemed to go on forever. I knew from the Google Earth aerial photos that there was a pool and a tennis court out there somewhere. We couldn’t see either one.
Across the room, near the windows, three people sat on two large leather sofas. I assumed it was the congressman, his wife, and the elusive Bradley Benton III, but they were still about thirty feet away and the only light in the room was spilling in through the windows and backlighting the three figures, so I couldn’t tell for sure.
As Campos led us closer, one of the men stood up and I recognized the congressman’s bearing and posture. A few steps away, the angle of our view changed and I recognized Mrs. Benton. She was holding a younger man’s hand in both of hers, and when she stood up, it looked almost as if she were lifting his weight, too.
The congressman nodded at Jen and me, but his wife didn’t acknowledge us. She just stood next to her son.
He was tall. Six three or six four, with a swimmer’s build. His clothes were impeccable—expensive jeans and a pale-yellow silk button-down shirt. But his shoulders slumped, and his poster-boy face was dull and worn. He looked liked he’d been on a days-long bender and we’d woken him somewhere in the middle of the first hour of sleeping it off.
“Mr. Benton,” Jen said with genuine compassion, “we’re very sorry for your loss.”
Bradley raised his head and parted his lips, but no sound came out. He stood there for a few seconds, looking bereft, turned his face back to his mother, who returned to him a sad hint of a smile. They both sat back down on the sofa. Only then did he finally close his mouth.
Campos gestured to the empty sofa across from them, and Jen and I sat down.
I took out my notebook and Jen began.
“We’ll make this as brief as we can,” she said. “When was the last time you saw your wife and children?”
Bradley tried to speak but was barely able to get out a whispered “I” before his eyes began filling with tears and he raised a hand to his mouth. He put his other arm across his midsection and bent forward as if he’d been overcome by stomach cramps.
Then he began to moan.
There’s a version of the pain scale with a chart designed specifically for children. It has a different cartoon face with its own unique expression for each number on the scale. The illustration over the zero looks like a smiley face. That over the ten resembles nothing so much as the face of the agonized little man in Munch’s The Scream.
Nothing on that chart came anywhere close to the expression on Bradley’s face.
Campos stood up. “I’m sorry, Detectives.” He motioned for us to stand up and began leading us back out the same way we’d come in. “He’s still not well enough to talk to you.”
I took another look at Bradley before I followed. Either he was in genuine pain or he was an amazingly talented actor. I knew I wouldn’t be able to stand there long enough to form an educated guess as to which was the truth, so I turned and caught up with Jen and Campos.
Back out on the porch, he said to us, “Unfortunately, that’s how he’s been since he found out about his wife and children.”
I really wanted to mouth off to him, but Jen thanked him, put her hand on my elbow, and pulled me toward the cruiser before I had a chance to say anything we’d all regret later.
“So what was that?” Jen asked as the Bentons’ gate rolled closed behind us.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Still think he did it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think he was faking that.” We both looked out the windshield as we drove up through the winding streets and back out onto Bellflower Boulevard. “Maybe he did it, found out he didn’t have the spine he thought he did.”
“You want him to be the guy, don’t you?”
“It’s like you said. It would make our job easier.” I think she sensed the lie. I needed the challenge. The last thing I wanted was for the case to be easier. And if Bradley’s pain was real, easy wasn’t going to be very likely at all.
That night, as I went over the case files and felt the sharpness of the pain snaking up my arm and into my neck, I wondered about my disingenuous answer to Jen’s question that afternoon. I tried to be completely honest with myself. Of course I wanted to make the case. There was no question about that. But I also couldn’t deny that the more complicated the case became, the more it seemed to occupy my attention and to ease my awareness of my pain.
So what did I want, really?
I tried to focus my attention back on my notes but couldn’t do it. There wasn’t anything on TV even vaguely interesting that I hadn’t already seen. For a few minutes, I watched an episode of House Hunters that I had seen before but thought I could get through again because the hunt was in Portland, a city I’ve always been fond of, but that wasn’t enough. I knew the couple was just going to pick the wrong house again and not even making snarky comments to the screen would change that.
The banjo case was still next to the couch. I opened it and took out the five-string. The weight still surprised me. With the fingers of my left hand hovering over the frets, I ran my right thumb across the strings. I liked the sound. But then I tried to hold down a few random notes high on the neck and strummed again. What I heard made me grimace. I put the instrument away, fearing my neighbors would think I was torturing some kind of small animal.
In the kitchen, I tried to decide between vodka and Vicodin. I couldn’t make a decision,
so I opened the cupboard over my oven and found a year-old bottle of Ambien. I’d given up on it when it didn’t seem to have any appreciable effect on my insomnia. Just for the hell of it, I took two of them and went to bed.
A few hours later, I drifted off just long enough to dream that I had discovered new evidence in the case of the traffic accident that took my wife’s life, proving that she had, in fact, committed suicide.
“Looks like most of his financials are joint accounts,” I said.
“So we can track Bradley without raising any red flags,” Patrick said. “Can’t we do that anyway? We always have to look at the spouse, right?”
“We do. But this gives us a little bit of cover if it really is Bradley. Down the road, a sharp defense lawyer could argue that we focused exclusively on him when there were other viable suspects.”
“But there are other viable suspects, right?”
“Right. We just need to keep turning over rocks.”
“Starting with Bradley’s.”
“Yeah. Can you set up an alert so I’ll get a text message whenever he uses a credit or debit card?”
“You’re joking, right?”
“No.” I left it at that because I wasn’t sure if the joke he was referring to was that it was so easy to do or so hard. I should have known enough about Patrick’s abilities by that point to realize it was the former.
A few hours later, as Jen and I were tossing ideas back and forth, Patrick came in with his giant MacBook Pro under his arm and sat down at his desk. “Hey, guys,” he said. “Check these out.” He flipped open the computer as we flanked him and looked over his shoulders.
“What is it?” I asked.
“ATM surveillance photos. From the Wells Fargo on PCH and Main in Seal Beach.”
On the screen, he had pulled up a series of distorted fish-eye photos of a scruffy man in sunglasses and a Dodgers cap. “That look like anyone you know?”