It was another conversation we’d had that if I did lose my job, I could grab some freelance jobs doing research like Barbara Marracino. She and her husband Larry had done research for attorneys and other professionals, including for Steele. Larry had done field work as an investigator while Barbara did the computer work from their home. After Larry died, it became solely a computer research business. When Barbara retired, she’d given me her secret stash of investigative websites, which had proven very handy in several situations, both for the firm and for me personally. I was sure I could do it, but I really did enjoy going into the office and working with people directly. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be stuck at home working by myself. I was about to say that to Greg when we heard two short, loud pops. Wainwright scrambled to his feet and started barking. If the door hadn’t been shut, the animal would have dashed out.
Greg’s head snapped toward the front of the shop. “Was that gunfire?”
We both turned to look out the window to the open work area of the shop. Chris had ducked behind the counter. Mr. Fujita was nowhere in sight. Everything seemed to stop, as if someone had hit a pause button. Seconds later something crashed into the shop’s front door, and a man stumbled into the shop and dropped to the floor. Chris poked his head over the counter. “Greg!” he shouted as he got to his feet. “Quick!” Chris hopped over the gate, not bothering to unlatch it, forgetting his own safety.
Greg yanked open his office door and propelled himself quickly to the front with me on his heels. Wainwright got there ahead of us. Had he not been a senior canine, I’m sure he would have scaled the gate like Chris. We opened the gate and the three of us spilled into the customer area, Wainwright growling and barking. Greg quieted the dog and ordered him to his bed. Wainwright did as he was told but clearly wasn’t happy about it. It was his job to protect Greg, and Greg was interfering with his job.
I looked down at the floor. Chris was crouched next to a large man clutching his gut. It was Burt Sandoval, and he was in bad shape.
Greg stabbed at the face of his cell phone, calling 911. A second later he was explaining the situation and requesting an ambulance, reciting the shop’s address into the phone with clear-headed precision.
“We’re getting help,” Chris told Burt. “Hang in there.”
In response, Burt moaned. It was then I saw the blood. It was seeping out from under Burt’s hand. He was wearing a black T-shirt, and the color of the shirt was doing its best to hide the growing stain spreading across Burt’s ample middle. Chris saw it too and looked up at me, his small brown eyes wide as dinner plates in horror. I knelt down on the floor next to Burt.
“Burt,” I said. “What happened? Can you tell me?” I was growing alarmed at his ashen skin and the way his eyes kept trying to roll up into his head. I softly touched the hand grabbing the wound site. Burt yelped, but the pain made him more alert.
“The ambulance is on its way,” Greg announced. “We need to put something clean against the wound to stop the bleeding.” We all looked around, but clean bandages weren’t at hand. “Chris,” Greg said, “run and get a new roll of paper towels.” Chris took off toward the back of the shop. “Get a couple,” Greg called out after him. “And shut my office door. I don’t want Wainwright out here again. There will be too many people.”
Chris shut Greg’s door before dashing for the back. He returned quickly, ripping the wrapper off of a roll of paper towels as he ran, another roll tucked under one arm. He started to unroll several sheets, but Greg stopped him. “No, just use it whole,” he instructed Chris. “Press it against the wound to stop the bleeding. Sheets will absorb too quickly and get soggy.”
Chris knelt down next to Burt. We worked as a team. I gently raised Burt’s hand off the wound. He cried out and grabbed for me with his free hand. I managed to get the bloody hand up enough for Chris to insert the thick, round roll of towels against the wound and gently press to stop the bleeding. We heard a siren approaching.
“Chris,” Greg said, “go out and flag the ambulance down so they don’t waste time looking for us. And try to push those people back.” Still holding Burt’s bloody hand, I pressed down gently on the towels while Chris darted out of the shop to greet the ambulance.
Outside, a couple of people from the other businesses in the strip mall were staring through the windows into the shop, watching us, buzzing low and excitedly. I heard more sirens. Gunshots weren’t common in this area. It wasn’t a big crowd, just a handful, but as with Maurice’s rescue, I saw a couple of cell phones being held out to capture this horrific moment on video. Two times in three days. We were on our way to becoming YouTube stars, but it was not in a good way.
“Help is here, Burt,” Greg said to the injured man. “Hang on.”
Burt nodded feebly, then the hand in mine went slack.
seven
Burt Sandoval didn’t die on the threshold of Ocean Breeze Graphics. His life ended soon after arriving at the hospital, in spite of the efforts of the paramedics and ER staff. We were told he’d received not one but two gunshots to the gut, which matched the number of shots we had heard. It wasn’t difficult for the Huntington Beach Police to locate Burt’s vehicle. He’d parked his late-model silver pickup truck in front of Ocean Breeze. It was the only vehicle with its driver’s door hanging open—the only vehicle with a blood trail leading from it to the shop’s front door. From the blood, it looked like Burt had been shot just as he got out, then stumbled into the shop for help.
We were all grilled by detectives. So were the other shop owners and the few customers of those establishments who’d hung around to watch the excitement.
“You’re the guy who saved the dog, aren’t you?” the detective who talked to Greg and me asked after he’d gotten our names and other basic information, along with our report of the shooting. He’d identified himself as Detective Conrad Chapman. His partner was talking to Chris in the lunchroom. Chapman was short and wiry with pasty skin and pale red hair. He was what would be called a strawberry blond. His suit was slightly disheveled. We didn’t catch his partner’s name, but he was Latino, taller, and just as wrinkled. The heat wave was still beating Southern California into the pavement, and it was not weather to be out and about in while wearing a coat and tie.
“Yeah,” Greg answered, “that was us.”
“And you didn’t see the shooting, right?” the detective asked, not for the first time.
“No,” I answered. “Like we’ve already said, we were in here but only heard the shots.”
We were back in Greg’s office. Chapman and I sat in two chairs near Greg’s desk. Wainwright was curled up asleep on his bed, tuckered out by all the excitement. When the police arrived, he’d nearly gone hoarse from barking until Greg calmed him down. The poor dog knew something bad was afoot. Chapman had pulled his chair up close to the desk to facilitate taking notes. We’d been going over everything in detail with him for about thirty minutes already. Greg wheeled to his mini fridge and pulled out two bottles of water. He placed one in front of Chapman, who nodded his thanks and stopped to twist the cap off and take a drink. Greg held the other out to me. “You want a cold one, sweetheart?”
I shook my head. I was clutching the water I’d opened earlier. “This is fine.”
Greg twisted the top off the water he was holding and took his own thirsty drink. “Yes, we were in here when we heard it,” he explained after he’d swallowed. “And we looked up just in time to see Chris—that’s my manager—take a dive behind the counter.” Greg and I knew the drill. The cops would ask the same questions over and over, interwoven with new queries, looking for inconsistencies and slivers of newly remembered observations in the account.
“And there were no customers in the place or other employees?” Chapman asked. This was a new question.
Greg shook his head. “There was one other employee working today. He was out making a delivery, then taking lun
ch. After the ambulance left, I called him and told him to go home. No sense him coming back to work with all this going on.”
Chapman looked up. “We still might want to talk to him. What’s his name?”
“Aziz Hajjar,” Greg answered. “I have one other employee, but she’s on vacation.”
“No customers?”
“There was one when I came in,” I offered. “I think Chris called him Mr. Fujita.”
Greg nodded as he took another drink of water. “Mr. Fujita came in to have some flyers copied for his church. It was for a mailing, I think. A copy-and-fold job.”
“He must have left right before it happened,” I said. “Chris should know when he left, but he wasn’t there when the shooting happened.”
“This Fujita come in often?” Chapman asked.
Greg gave it some thought and nodded. “Off and on. He also has the menus for his restaurant done here when he updates them, but usually he brings in stuff for his church—sometimes him, sometimes his wife.”
Chapman looked up from his notes. “Do you know where his restaurant is?”
“Yes,” Greg answered. “It’s called Golden Sun Sushi.”
“You mean the little place painted bright yellow over on Goldenwest and Warner?” Chapman asked. When Greg nodded, Chapman added, “I know it. My partner and I grab lunch there once in a while. They have great lunch specials.”
Chapman jotted more notes, then looked up again. “And the victim, this Burt Sandoval, was he a regular customer?”
Both Greg and I shook our heads, but I let Greg answer. “Again, we’d never met Burt until last Saturday,” Greg told Chapman. “He helped us rescue the dog in that parking lot.”
“Marla Kingston’s dog, wasn’t it?” Chapman asked for clarification.
“Yes,” Greg confirmed. “But he had disappeared from the crowd by the time the police showed up. Then today he called out of the blue and asked to meet me here at the shop.”
Chapman’s face was a blank canvas except for a flicker in his left eye. “If you didn’t know him until last Saturday, how did he know where you worked?”
I took this question. “Greg was wearing a ball cap with the name of the shop on it Saturday, and one of the newscasts mentioned Ocean Breeze by name.”
“But you didn’t exchange contact information, email addresses, stuff like that?”
“We did with the cops on the scene, but with Burt only our names,” I answered. I paused, then remembered something. “But Burt was on the videos people shot of us on Saturday. You know, the ones that were all over YouTube and the news. At least he was until the police arrived.”
Chapman absorbed the information. I could see from his face that it was being digested and sorted in his brain. “Why did he want to see you today?” he asked Greg.
Greg shrugged. “I have no idea. He just called and asked if I’d be around, then said he’d be here in about an hour. In the meantime, Odelia surprised me and dropped in.”
This time Chapman zoomed in on me, sniffing out the possibility of new information. “You said you work in a law firm, is that right, Ms. Grey?”
“Yes, over by South Coast Plaza,” I replied.
“That’s a good drive on a weekday. Do you often drop in on your husband in the middle of the work day?”
“Not often,” I said, wondering how much to tell the detective. My being put on leave was none of his business, but it did have something to do with the Kingstons and therefore, in a roundabout way, to Burt Sandoval. I glanced over at Greg, who was watching me. “I had this afternoon off and decided to see if Greg had had lunch yet.” I couldn’t tell if Chapman bought that or thought there was more to the story. He was more difficult to read than a Chinese newspaper.
“We should tell him, Odelia,” Greg said. “Just in case.” I fidgeted in my seat.
“I’m all ears, folks,” Chapman said, leaning back in his chair with his bottle of water as if settling in for a good campfire yarn.
Seeing how uncomfortable I was, Greg took the reins. “My wife was put on administrative leave today because Kelton Kingston threatened her job after what happened on Saturday.”
Chapman straightened up, looking at me with more interest. “You work for Kingston?”
I shook my head, but it was Greg who answered. “No, she doesn’t, but he’s a client of her firm. First he wanted to sue us, but when he found out she worked for his lawyers, he insisted that they fire her.”
“And they did?” Chapman sounded surprised.
“No,” I said. “They put me on paid leave until they could sort this all out. They’re hoping Kingston will cool down and forget about me.”
Chapman put down his water and picked up his pen, hovering it over his notes again. He stabbed at the paper a few times before saying, “And who can verify this?”
“Michael Steele,” Greg told him. “He’s one of the partners and Odelia’s supervisor.” Greg picked up his phone, tapped the face, then turned it toward Chapman. “You can reach him at this number. We talked to him just before the shooting.” Chapman wrote down the information.
I looked out the window of Greg’s office. I could see crime-scene workers gathering evidence around the shop’s threshold and in the parking lot. Yellow crime-scene tape cordoned off the parking lot. I also spotted a couple of news vans. Great. We’d be on the news again.
I looked back at Chapman. “You don’t think this had anything to do with Kingston, do you?”
“Who knows,” Chapman said. He closed his notebook. “Could be a number of things totally unrelated to this past Saturday. Could be something only Sandoval was involved with—someone with a grudge who followed him here. But we can’t ignore that you were threatened and Sandoval shot on the same day. Maybe Kingston found out who he was and threatened him too. Maybe Sandoval wanted to warn you.” He looked at Greg. “Did Sandoval sound anxious or upset when he called you today?”
Greg dug back in his recent memory. “Not that I could tell. In fact, he sounded kind of casual, like if I’d said I was too busy to see him, he’d have been okay with it.”
This wasn’t making sense to me. “Kelton Kingston is hardly citizen of the month, but do you really think he’d kill someone over his wife’s dog? Seems like overkill, doesn’t it?” Greg shot me a judgy look at my questionable choice of words.
“It does on the face of it.” Chapman stood up, finished with the questioning. “But people kill for the oddest reasons, and Kingston was sure ready enough to bury you and your career over the dog, wasn’t he?”
eight
After the cops left, Greg told Chris to shut everything down; they were closing for the day. Chris was clearly happy to comply. He’d never seen a man who’d been shot before, and it had shaken him to his core. Greg assured him that everything would be back to normal in the morning. Chris didn’t look so sure about that, and neither was I, but he went about the business of turning off the equipment to close down.
Greg said goodbye to me at the door. The parking lot was still cordoned off, but the police were letting people remove their cars now. “I’ll be right behind you, sweetheart,” Greg said. “When I get home, let’s go out to eat. We’ll have an early dinner since neither of us have had lunch.”
My stomach was growling, reminding me that he was correct, but my head was on Burt Sandoval. Why would he want to speak to Greg? Why would someone shoot him? Had it been something only involving him or was it connected to Saturday? Maybe he was mixed up with unsavory characters who had followed him here and saw an opportunity to take him out. Did he have a record? Was that why he’d left the scene on Saturday when the police arrived?
“Does that sound good to you, Odelia?” Greg asked, his voice breaking through my thoughts. “Or would you prefer I bring home Chinese food?”
I shook off the sticky web of questions in my head to answer. �
�Let’s do Chinese,” I told him. “I’d rather stay in.”
“You got it,” he said with a tired smile. He lifted his chin up, and I bent and kissed him. It made me feel a bit better. Whatever was going on, Greg and I would see it through.
“Do you want me to take Wainwright?” I asked. “That way he won’t have to sit in the hot van when you go in for the Chinese food.”
“Good idea.” Greg called to Wainwright. The old dog trotted out of the office to the front of the shop.
“Come on, boy,” I told the animal. “You’re going home with me.” Wainwright looked reluctant. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust my driving, but he hated to be away from Greg unless I was taking him on a long walk. I patted my leg. “Come on, Wainwright. Time to go home.” This time the dog wagged his tail and followed me out the door. It was still too hot for a walk, but maybe later I’d take him down to the beach a few blocks from our home. We usually took our walk in the morning, but this morning Greg had gone to work earlier than usual.
When I got home I checked on Muffin and Dumpster, then thought about calling Mom. The last thing I wanted was for her to accuse us of having “fun” without her when she saw tonight’s news. But then I thought twice about the call. Mom was out of town, and this probably wouldn’t go beyond local news. We could bring her up to speed once she got home and this had blown over.
I’d washed a load of towels in the morning and thrown them in the dryer just before leaving for work. The washer and dryer were located in a closet with folding doors at the end of the hallway leading to the guest room. I scooped the dry towels into a plastic clothes basket and carried it to the living room. The towels needed folding, but I was tackling the chore more to keep busy until Greg got home. After folding one bath towel, I aimed the remote at the big TV on the wall opposite the sofa and searched for news. It was still a little early for the local news to start, and after finding none, I turned off the TV and turned on some music. In the meantime, Muffin had hopped into the clothes basket and made a nest in the clean towels. I looked down at the little cat. “Sorry,” I apologized as I pulled another towel out, dislodging her, “but unless you’re folding these suckers, you’re in the way.” She gave me her disgruntled meow and left the basket in search of more quiet sleeping quarters.
Too Big to Die Page 6