Too Big to Die

by Sue Ann Jaffarian

  She turned to me and the small smile returned. “Last month I tailed Greg home from his shop. Today I was sitting outside your place, wondering if I should knock or leave a note, when you came out with the dog.”

  “How did you know I was home?”

  “Your car is in the back,” she said, her voice even and matter-of-fact. “You usually work Thursdays, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but as you can see, I’m a bit beaten up right now.”

  “What happened to you?” she asked.

  “I fell down some stairs yesterday while visiting someone,” I told her, leaving out anything about Jordon West and Doris Hoffman. “I’m kind of a klutz.”

  An awkward silence wedged between us. “Just how long have you been following us?” I asked, not a little impressed at her skills in spite of my annoyance at being followed and not realizing it.

  She shrugged. “A couple of months, off and on.”

  I did some quick calculations. “Did your mother’s recent death trigger that?”

  She nodded. “I didn’t know who Greg was until a few months ago. It was after she was diagnosed.” She paused, then added after a deep breath, “My mother had pancreatic cancer. Advanced. She went quick.”

  “I’m very sorry, Holly. Truly sorry.” I turned on the bench to fully face her, taking off my sunglasses so she could see my eyes. “It’s not easy to lose a parent when you’re so young. Did she tell you that Greg was your father?”

  She shook her head, her long hair waving with the motion. “No, she said he wasn’t, but wished he was.” She paused. “I wish he was too.” She turned to look at me. “He seems pretty cool.”

  I chuckled. “He has his faults, believe me, but overall he is pretty cool. Since we discovered your existence, he’s been wondering if he was your dad, and he’s not upset by the thought. Neither of us are,” I quickly added. “At least as long as you’re not some kind of serial killer.” That comment induced another small smile. “Are you sure he’s not your father? We know about Jordon West and know he’s not.”

  “Yeah,” Holly said. “My mother always told me that the man on my birth certificate was not my father. She was clear about that. She always told me that he was just a very nice man she knew once, so she put his name down so my real father wouldn’t try to find me. As for Greg, Mom said she was absolutely sure he wasn’t my father. She said if it had been Greg, she wouldn’t have done the whole secret thing.”

  We both stared out at the sea, letting the words rest and breathe. Holly broke the silence. “My mother could have had gotten an abortion, but she didn’t. She told me my real father would have pressured her to have one. It was just the two of us, but I always knew that I was wanted and loved.”

  I noticed Wainwright was panting. I pulled his water dish from the tote bag with my good arm.

  “Here,” Holly said, “let me help you.” She took the dish and filled it with some water from one of the bottles I’d brought. As soon as the dish was on the ground, Wainwright attacked it. I offered Holly the other unopened bottle, but she declined, saying she’d use the bottle in her hand. I opened the new bottle for myself.

  “This reminds me of the day you guys rescued that poor little dog,” she said, watching Wainwright. “That was so awesome.”

  “So you followed us that day?” I asked before taking a drink of my own water.

  She nodded. “I was thinking about talking to you on Saturday, but then the whole thing with the dog and Marla Kingston happened.” She turned to me. “I was shocked to see her there, at least I was at first.”

  True to my word, I gave Holly a brief explanation of how we stumbled upon her information but left out Marigold specifically, just saying, as I usually do, that I had access to a lot of good search engines. “When we looked into you and your videos, we noticed that you had filmed the Kingstons a couple of times. After, we wondered if you were following Marla on Saturday.”

  “I’ve followed both her and Kingston several times. Not everything I video is on my YouTube channel.” She made a sound of disgust. “Kingston is the real stain on humanity, isn’t he?”

  “That he is,” I agreed. I wanted to tell her that Kingston was the reason I wasn’t at work, but couldn’t without linking him to our firm. “What about Burt Sandoval?” I asked instead. “Had you ever followed or seen him before Saturday and Monday?”

  “Not intentionally,” she answered, which raised my eyebrows. She hesitated. “Monday was a real surprise. I’ve…I’ve…,” she said, stuttering.

  “You’ve never seen a man killed before,” I said, finishing what I expected her to say.

  She shook her head. “I was standing across the street just shooting random video, which I often do, sometimes just to calm my nerves. I was trying to get up the courage to go into Ocean Breeze. I’d decided over the weekend to finally go ahead and approach Greg. When I saw you drive up, I was glad because I thought it might be better to talk to both of you at once.” She took a long drink of her water. “I kept filming and finally decided I was ready. I was about to cross the street when I saw Burt pull into the lot with his truck. I was surprised, so I hung back and started filming again. I did it more out of curiosity because I’d seen him before and thought it odd that he was a friend of yours.”

  “We weren’t friends with Burt,” I told her. “We had never met him before Saturday.”

  Holly turned toward the ocean again. “Well, anyway, he was halfway out of his truck when I heard the shot and saw he was hit. Then he stumbled into the shop.” She looked back at me. “I didn’t know what to do, so I kept filming.”

  “Holly,” I began, after giving her words some thought, “you said you’d never intentionally filmed Burt before. So you’d videoed him before unintentionally?”

  She nodded. “A couple of times when I’d followed Marla Kingston. They knew each other. I was surprised to see her at the grocery store that day until I saw Burt. They’d met at Starbucks there before.”

  “You’re sure about this?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I have it all on my computer. I tracked you all down and started following you shortly before Mom died, after she told me some stuff. Burt and Marla had met a couple of times before Saturday.”

  “Were they lovers?” I asked, unable to picture the two of them together.

  Holly shook her head. “I don’t think so. The few times I saw them together they were always off by themselves talking, but it didn’t look romantic, more adversarial.”

  So Marla could have been waiting for Burt Saturday when she was hiding in the clothing store. But why, if they weren’t lovers? And adversarial was a specific and interesting word choice. Did Marla have anything to do with his death? Did Burt have something on Marla? In digging back through my brain, I came across the bit when Marla first arrived on the scene of Maurice’s rescue. She’d pointed directly at Burt and asked if he’d done the damage. She didn’t consider anyone else, just him, at the beginning. She hadn’t been racially profiling him after all. What did poor Burt know that got him killed? And why was he interested in meeting with Greg?

  “Have you gone to the police yet with this?” I asked Holly.

  “Just with the video I took that day,” she said. “I got them a copy of that as soon as I posted some of it to my site.”

  “I’ve seen the video on your YouTube channel,” I said. “You didn’t post the actual shooting.”

  “No,” she answered. “I felt it was too graphic. I often film human suffering as a statement, but watching a man die is something else.” She shook her head again. “Sometimes I wish I’d never posted what I had of that day. It put too much of a spotlight on me. People asking too many questions.”

  I turned and stared at her, wishing she’d take off her sunglasses. Holly West was a very interesting character, full of tragedy, purpose, and good intentions. “What did you tell the police as t
o why you were there that day and the day of the dog rescue? I’m sure they looked at your videos, same as we did, and wondered why you were in both places.”

  “I don’t think the Huntington Beach police have realized yet that I was in the parking lot Saturday,” she said. “I didn’t offer that video, just the one of Burt being shot. I told them I was in the neighborhood filming background for a video sequence I was putting together and just stumbled upon the shooting. They questioned me for hours and hours, then let me go.”

  “Did you speak with Detective Chapman and his partner?” I asked.

  “Yes. I figure it’s only a matter of time before they connect me to the dog thing, so I took that video down just to buy myself time to figure this out.”

  “Holly,” I said, my voice gentle, “if your mother told you there was no way Greg was your father, why did you start following him?”

  Again Holly got lost in the ocean view. A few people walked by, but she didn’t notice them. “When Mom was dying, she started telling me a lot about her life, especially when she was young. My mother was a loner, like me. She told me about her friendship with Greg, saying how much she’d liked him and wished he’d been my father. She told me that she’d kept track of him over the years and often thought about reconnecting with him but never did. She told me that over the past several years, his name and yours had popped up connected with solving some crimes, and she said if I ever needed help, I should go to him. She said that even after all these years, he would help me.”

  I smiled. “Your mother was right. Greg would never turn away the child of an old friend.”

  twenty-two

  My phone rang just as I was about to ask Holly if she knew who her father was. The call was from Greg. He was calling to see how I was doing and asked if I wanted anything special for dinner.

  “Zee brought over chicken and dumplings, so we’re good to go for dinner,” I said into the phone. Holly got up to leave, but I signaled for her to stay put. “Will you be home soon?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I’m leaving right now and just wanted to make sure you didn’t need anything.” There was a short pause. “I know I was an ass this morning. I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m just worried about you and don’t want you going back to the firm. I think it’s time for you to move on to something else.”

  “I know, honey,” I told him softly. “We’ll work it all out, and we’ll do it together.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay? Are you still in a lot of pain?”

  “Yeah, I’m still pretty sore, but I managed to take Wainwright for a walk. We’re at the beach now.”

  “Really?” he asked, his voice perking up. “Then you must be feeling a lot better.”

  “Not really,” I said, “but I thought moving would help the stiffness in my legs. It did, but I’m going to feel it tonight. We’re about to do the slow shuffle home.” I glanced at Holly. She was kneeling on the ground making friends with Wainwright. “By the way, Greg, we may have a guest for dinner. Someone I bumped into at the beach. Do you mind?”

  “No, not if you’re up to it,” he said. “I don’t want you to get too worn out. Who’s the guest?”

  “It’s a surprise,” I told him. “See you soon.”

  “Well, if it’s Dev,” Greg said with a chuckle, “tell him not to drink all my beer before I get there.”

  Holly needed some convincing to stay for dinner. She’d left her car near our house, and on the slow walk back I wore her down until she accepted. I also learned during those two long blocks that she’d graduated from the UCLA film school. She lived in Belmont Shores, a nice section of Long Beach, in the home she’d grown up in with her mother, and earned her living as a consultant, shooting and editing videos for web content, including for a couple of very popular YouTube channels. She liked working for herself, she told me. It gave her the freedom she needed to pursue her own art while still earning a living. If Greg had a daughter, I thought, this was probably the type of path she would have taken, and she would have been just as independent. I couldn’t wait for them to meet.

  When we got back to our house, she looked around with appreciation. “Wow, this living area is huge,” she said. “You’d never know it from the outside.”

  “This used to be a duplex, two identical two-bedroom units attached in the middle by a common wall,” I said. “Greg bought the building and combined them to make one large house to suit his needs. He designed it himself,” I told her proudly. “To the left is the master suite and bath, which he totally redid. He left the two bedrooms and the bath on the right pretty much the same except for widening the doorways and adding a hidden laundry area behind those folding doors.” I headed to the left. “I’ll be right back. If you need to use the bathroom,” I told her, “the guest bath is down the hall to the right. Just make sure to shut the door when you’re done.”

  When I came back out, Holly was studying the sticky notes plastered to the dining table. In her arms Muffin was sucking up a lot of pets and strokes. Wainwright was in his bed, tired from the excursion. Holly glanced up. “There’s a duck in your tub,” she announced with curiosity.

  “Just a temporary resident,” I told her. “His name’s Dumpster. He’ll be going to a new home in a few days. And the scamp in your arms is Muffin.”

  “Cool,” she said without emotion and went back to studying the notes. “Were you trying to figure out who I was or why Burt Sandoval was killed?” she asked without taking her eyes off the table.

  I looked down at the notes. “Both.” I tapped the sticker with Jordon’s name. “Zee and I met him. He’s a lovely man. A quadriplegic living in an assisted care place. Your mother never mentioned him?”

  She slowly shook her head. “Just to say that he was not my father.”

  She’d taken off her sunglasses and I could finally see her full face. It was slender, with smooth, youthful skin, a small nose, and a delicate mouth. I knew she was twenty-six, but her petite build and clothing made her look much younger, almost high-school age. But her eyes were not the eyes of a teen. They were sharp and curious, absorbing and weighing the information she took in through them, much as her videos did. Her eyes also spoke to her Asian roots.

  Holly put Muffin down and pointed at the note between Marla and Burt. “What does home remodel mean?”

  “That’s the connection between them,” I explained as I went into the kitchen to turn on the oven. “They might have met when the company Burt worked for did a remodeling job at a home the Kingstons used to own. But that was a couple of years back. We honestly didn’t think there were any other connections, but today you told me you’ve seen them together recently.”

  She nodded. “Yes, definitely.” She turned to me. “What about Burt’s wife? Have you talked to her yet?”

  I spun around to look at Holly. The sudden movement sent shock waves of pain through my battered body, and I grabbed the counter for support. “Burt wasn’t married. He was divorced.”

  “A girlfriend maybe?”

  I had been trying to wrangle the heavy casserole dish from the fridge, which was difficult with one arm incapacitated. “Here,” Holly said, coming into the kitchen. “Let me get that.” She lifted the dish out of the fridge and set it on the counter by the stove. “What’s this?” she asked, indicating the dish.

  “Zee’s wonderful chicken and dumplings. She brought it over this morning for our dinner tonight.” I glanced at Holly. “I should have asked you, are you vegan or gluten-free or anything like that?”

  She shook her head. “Nope. I eat most anything. Let me know when the oven’s ready, and I’ll stick it in for you.”

  She went back to the table and looked down again at the notes in Burt’s column. “The last time I saw Burt meet with Marla Kingston there was a woman in his car. She stayed behind while he went into the coffee shop for the meeting.”

  I went back to the table
and sat down, exhausted from doing not much of anything. “When was this?”

  “About a week or so before he was killed. The meeting was at the Starbucks that’s in that same strip mall.” She closed her eyes and was silent for a bit. “In fact, I’m pretty sure she was there last Saturday, the day you rescued the dog.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “Burt slipped away, but I never noticed where he went or when.”

  “Pretty sure,” Holly answered. “He left right after the police arrived and started questioning you guys. He watched everything going on as he melted to the back of the crowd. I turned to watch him leave and saw his truck in the next row. The same woman I’d seen with him before was in it.”

  “Did you get that on video?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “No, I had my camera still fixed on the commotion with Marla. But I definitely saw Burt go to his truck, and the woman was in the truck.”

  “Do you remember what the woman looked like?” I asked, leaning forward with expectation.

  “Hard to say since I’d only seen her a few times and it was always in the vehicle, but I think she had blond hair, dark blond or very light brown. In her forties, maybe, or late thirties. I could only see her from the shoulders up, but I’d say she was on the thin side.” Holly paused in her narrative. “Oh, and one more thing. She wore glasses, big ones, and they were red or maybe dark pink.”

  I reached toward the pad of yellow sticky notes. Holly picked them up and handed them to me, along with a pen. On the top one I wrote Donna, tore it off, and handed the note to Holly. “Would you please put that in Burt’s column for me?” She did as I asked.

  “You know her?” she asked after placing the note.

  “I’ve met her,” I said. “She works for the same company Burt did, and I think it’s time I pay her a visit for a little one-on-one chat.”