by Marcia Clark
Busted at last. “I’m his lawyer. Alex is—”
“I’m an investigator.” Alex stood up and we headed for the door. He paused at the entry and gave her a buttery smile. “If you think of anything else, please feel free to call. Anytime.”
I watched the tug-of-war on her face. Distaste for the sleazy defense lawyer fought with desire for the gorgeous investigator. Gorgeous investigator won.
As we moved down the sidewalk, Nikki leaned against the doorjamb and gave Alex her best sex-kitten smile. “I’ll definitely do that.”
Alex waved to her. I kept walking until I heard the door close, then stopped. “Nice job, Alex. Good to know you’re willing to slut it up for the team.”
“You kidding? That was nothing. I sold high-end cars, remember?”
SEVENTEEN
We knocked on the door of apartment 2C, but Sheila Wagner didn’t answer.
I was leaning in, trying to listen for signs of life, when the door to apartment 2D opened and a young guy, barefoot and naked to the waist in low-slung jeans, stepped out. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth, and his hazel eyes squinted at us above the smoke. He was hot in that dirty, up-against-the-wall kind of way. Back in my high school days, I would’ve gone for this guy in a fast second. His eyes flicked off Alex and landed on me. I was happy to take my turn to slut it up for the team.
I gave him a smile. “We’re looking for Sheila Wagner.”
“You probation officers?” I started to shake my head, but he laughed. “Joking. Sheila’s, like, a nun.”
In this neighborhood? “A nun?”
He gave a little chuckle. “No. She’s a librarian. But same difference, right? She’s probably just out walking her dog. Give it a few; she’ll be back.”
“Actually, we’re here to talk to people about Dale Pearson.”
“Dale.” He took a long pull from his cigarette and blew it out through the corner of his mouth. “Am I supposed to know him?”
“He’s the one they arrested for the murders.” He still looked puzzled. “Of Chloe and Paige.”
He nodded slowly. “You guys don’t look like cops.” I told him who we were. He nodded. “Nah, I never saw the dude. Saw Chloe, though. We had drinks a couple of times when I first moved in.”
“And?”
He looked out at the street. “She was a nice girl but a mess. There was something, I don’t know . . . broken about her.” He took another drag of his cigarette. “Like she’d seen too much in too few years.”
It was a much more nuanced insight than I’d have expected from this guy. And I got the reference. “The Stones. ‘19th Nervous Breakdown.’ You a musician?”
He nodded appreciatively as he looked me up and down. “Trying to be.”
I pushed down the electric surge from that look.
A female voice from inside his apartment called out. “Babe? What’s going on?”
He gave me a slow smile. “Duty calls.”
I held out my card. “Just in case you think of something.”
He took the card and glanced at it. “Or in case I get in trouble?”
“Or that.”
As he went back inside, I heard the skittering of dog toenails scratching up the walkway. A medium-size chocolate pit bull on a leash came into view. At the other end of the leash was a slender woman with long, almost waist-length brown hair. “Sheila?”
“Yes. Can I help you?” She looked flushed and a lot younger than I’d expected. Late twenties at most. The name Sheila seemed like it should belong to someone in her sixties at least.
I told her who we were. She gave a little frown. “Didn’t the police put my statement in a report?”
So the cops had spoken to her. I noticed her dog was sniffing at my boots. I took a step back just in case he decided to get a little more intimate. “Not that I saw. I got your name from Nikki.”
Sheila’s frown got deeper. “Don’t worry, Trixie doesn’t bite.”
“I wasn’t worried about the biting so much.”
Sheila nodded and gave the leash a little tug. Trixie backed up and lay down. “I didn’t really have much to say. I was at my folks’ house the night of the . . . the night they died.”
“Did you know Chloe or Paige?” I was waiting for her to invite us in where we could sit down and talk in private, but she didn’t seem inclined.
“Just to say ‘Hi’ to. But you might want to talk to C.J. I think he went out with Chloe.”
“C.J.’s your next-door neighbor?” Sheila looked over my shoulder at his door and nodded. The way her eyes lingered, I got the feeling she looked at his door a lot. “What did you tell the police?”
“Just that I’d met Dale Pearson a couple of months ago. My car got a flat up in the canyon, and I was waiting for Triple A to come. I had Trixie and Dixie with me. That was before Dixie passed. We were on our way home after a hike in Runyon Canyon, and they were really thirsty. They’re fifteen years old, so I was getting worried. Dale was the only one who stopped to see if he could help.”
Finally some good news. “And did he? Help, I mean.”
“Yes. He was super nice. Changed the tire, gave the girls some water—they loved him, and they don’t usually like men all that much. When I told him where I lived—”
“He asked where you lived?”
“I volunteered.” I guess my expression said more than I wanted it to because she nodded. “I know, dumb move. But he seemed so . . . safe. Anyway, I said I couldn’t believe I got a flat less than a mile from home, and he asked me if I lived near Chloe’s building. When I told him I lived next door, he asked whether I’d ever been burglarized or if I’d seen anyone suspicious hanging around the night of Chloe’s burglary.”
I liked what I was hearing more and more. And the fact that Sheila’s statement hadn’t shown up in any of the reports less and less. “What’d you tell him?”
Sheila smiled a little. “That the most suspicious people I’ve seen in this neighborhood are the ones who live here.” Her eyes drifted back to C.J.’s apartment. “I’ve never been burglarized, but I have this little motion detector.” Sheila looked down fondly at her motion detector, who seemed to have fallen asleep on Sheila’s foot. “And back then I had her sister, Dixie, too. But I really don’t see much. I work at the library all day, and when I come home, I shut the world out.”
“So you don’t know any of your other neighbors? Other than Nikki and C.J.?”
Sheila shook her head. “Really just C.J. I met Nikki only because I was coming home with Trixie when that police officer was leaving her place. She pointed me out to him.”
“Did you ever see Dale after that day?”
“A couple of times, as he was coming or going. We just waved and said hi.”
“Then you never saw him driving up and down the street at night, looking around?”
Sheila frowned. “No. Never. But like I said, I don’t see much of anything at night. I come home, have dinner, go to bed.”
“Did you tell the police officer that you’d met Dale?”
“Oh yeah. I did. But he didn’t seem all that impressed. He seemed kind of impatient, like, ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever.’ You know?”
I sure did. And pretty soon, thanks to fifty-some-odd news channels, so would everyone else.
EIGHTEEN
We headed to Chloe’s building, which was next door to Sheila’s. I didn’t need to know Chloe’s address to figure out it was where she’d lived. The entire sidewalk and grass median in front of the building was filled with flowers, teddy bears, candles, and hand-painted signs that wept with love for Chloe, and anguish at having lost her. When we managed to weave our way through it all, I saw that the building was a little more worn than Sheila’s, dingy white with peeling green trim, and it was positioned so that the side faced the street and the back faced the canyon.
I wanted to get an idea of the layout, so we walked down the open corridor that led past the first-floor apartments. There were six units on the
first floor and six on the second floor. Chloe and Paige lived on the second floor in apartment 208.
There was only one witness I wanted to talk to here. Others had said they’d heard Dale and Chloe fighting, but the most detailed, and damaging, statement had come from Janet Rader. She was the prosecution’s key eyewitness—or rather, ear-witness. I’d debated whether I should even bother talking to her. Even if she tried to hedge on the witness stand, the DA would get her to confirm what she’d said to the police—which was plenty. But I had to see if I could find any weak spots.
“I’ll take this one, Alex. But feel free to step in if you think I’m missing something.”
He nodded. I knocked on the door. There was no answer. I waited a few seconds and raised my hand to knock again, but the door unexpectedly opened, leaving my fist in midair. A slender young man stood in the doorway. I’d expected an older woman in her seventies. I told him we were here to speak to Janet Rader about Chloe Monahan and Paige Avner.
“Oh, you want my mother.” He looked from me to Alex. “You don’t look like cops. Who are you?”
“We represent Dale Pearson, and we’re speaking to all the witnesses listed in the police reports.” I always try to make it sound like everyone else has talked to me.
“I—I don’t really think she’s up to it. Maybe she could call you?”
Alex chimed in. “It’ll take only a few minutes, really—”
A voice came from somewhere behind the young man. “Evan? Who is that?” He told her. “It’s okay, let them in. I’ll talk to them.” A taller, stocky woman with short graying hair, wearing black rubber nurse’s shoes and polyester slacks, came to the door and gestured for us to come in. “I don’t want you saying in court that I refused to talk to you.”
She’d obviously been a witness before. When witnesses refuse to talk to me, I always make them admit it to the jury. It shows they’re biased against me. Sometimes that helps. More often, it doesn’t.
Evan started to follow us into the tiny dining area off the kitchen, but Janet waved him off. “I can handle this myself. You go finish figuring out what’s wrong with my computer.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. Now go.”
He went. Janet put on a pair of round wire-rimmed glasses that had been hanging from the neck of her T-shirt and gestured for us to sit down at the dining table. “I assume you want to hear about that night.”
“I do.” I took a notepad out of my purse. “How well did you know Chloe and Paige?”
“I didn’t know them beyond saying hello when we passed on the walkway. But I saw their comings and goings quite a bit. I used to be a manager at Target, but I’m retired now, so I’m home a lot.”
“Did they have a lot of visitors?”
“Not lately, no. When Chloe first moved in, she seemed to be pretty popular. A lot of young men came around.”
“How do you know they were there to see Chloe? Why not Paige?”
“Because I’d see them leave with Chloe.”
See them leave. There weren’t any windows that offered a view of the walkway. “How did you see them leave?”
“Through the peephole in my door. And sometimes I’d see her coming or going with them when I was out doing chores or laundry.”
Aha. Janet was the Gladys Kravitz of the building. Every apartment building has one. “Did you ever meet Dale Pearson?”
“Well, of course. He was here almost every day.”
“Can you describe your first meeting?” I expected to get some vague I-don’t-know type of answer. Wrong.
“He was knocking on their door, and when no one opened up, he kept on knocking and knocking. I thought he’d break the door down, so I went out and told him they weren’t home. He got really angry, said Chloe knew he was coming.”
“Was he yelling?”
“No. I could just tell he was . . . well, let’s say very annoyed.”
Okay, let’s. “Did he leave after you told him they weren’t there?”
“No. I told him to come back later, and he gave me a dirty look—”
“What did he say to you?”
“To me? Nothing. But then Chloe came home, and he really laid into her. Asked her where she’d been and why she didn’t call to tell him she’d be late.” Janet paused. “It doesn’t sound like much now, but it was the way he said it. He wasn’t yelling at the time, but there was . . . heat in his voice. It felt as though if I hadn’t been there, he would’ve really gone off on her. There was something kind of, I don’t know, scary about him.”
I wished I could say Janet seemed like the type to embellish, but she didn’t. It made me wonder whether Nikki was a little more accurate than I’d given her credit for—and how many more witnesses the cops would dig up who’d paint a similar picture of Dale. “How long ago was that?”
“About a month ago.”
“Did they get into a fight?”
“Not that time, no.”
“But they fought at other times? Before that last night?”
“Several times. From what I could hear, it sounded like he was upset about her doing drugs.” She shook her head. “Can’t blame him for that.”
“How did you manage to hear all that?”
“They left their sliding glass door open a lot. I do, too. These apartments aren’t big, and they can get pretty stuffy. Anyway, the night she died, they had a terrible fight, worst one ever. I figured she’d break up with him sooner or later, and I was right.”
“She broke up with him?” Janet nodded. “You heard her say that?” That hadn’t been in Janet’s statement.
“Loud and clear.”
“Then why didn’t you tell the police about it?”
“I thought I did.” Janet frowned.
I didn’t want to believe her. But it wasn’t just the flat certainty in her voice. It was the fact that I knew Chloe’s sister had said she intended to break up that night, too. This was bad. Worse than bad. A hair-trigger temper and a classic motive. The likelihood of being able to pin this on someone else was getting slimmer by the minute. I looked at her sliding glass door. The drapes were closed. “Were they yelling at the time?”
“Almost from the moment they walked in the door.” Janet looked down at her hands, which were folded in her lap. “I knew I should’ve called the police. But they had so many fights. And he’s a police officer. I never would’ve thought he’d . . .” Her voice trailed off.
I’d known she was going to be a tough witness for us. But now I knew Janet was going to cream us. I had to find out how much more damage she could do. “Did you happen to see Paige that night?”
“I might’ve heard her come home. But I can’t be sure. I went to bed early that night. The fighting’s what woke me up.”
“Then you think Paige came home before Chloe?”
“Maybe. I’m really not sure about that.”
“Do you know what time you woke up? I mean, because of the fighting?” Maybe she could help us fix a time that would show Dale was out of there too early to have killed them.
“I can get close. By the time I got up, they’d been fighting for a while. I decided to make myself some warm milk, and I remember looking at the clock on the oven. It said one thirty in the morning. It can be off by a minute or two, but not much more.”
Shit. The coroner put the time of death between one a.m. and four a.m. “Did you go back to bed after that?”
“Not right away. I stayed in the kitchen and drank my milk. That’s how come I heard their front door open and close. When I went to look, I saw him walking down the hallway toward the stairs.”
“Did you notice anything unusual about him?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t see much. I was looking through the peephole, and his back was to me.”
I needed to regroup and think for a minute. “Do you mind if I go out on your balcony?”
Janet pursed her lips and folded her arms. “Be my guest. You’ll see. You can hear everything cl
ear as a bell when the glass doors are opened.”
“I’m not doubting you.” I kind of was. Or maybe just hoping. “I just want to see what the balconies look like. I assume all the apartments have the same floor plan?”
“As far as I know.”
Alex and I crossed the living room, and I pulled the drapes aside. It was a small but serviceable balcony with a wood railing. A rusting hibachi sat in the right corner. Chloe’s apartment was on the left, and her balcony was within arm’s reach. No doubt about it, if both of their sliding glass doors were open, Janet could easily have heard every word. I told Alex to get some pictures.
As I looked around, I noticed that the ground behind the building was higher and that all the units had identical balconies. I’d wondered how a burglar could’ve gotten to a second-floor apartment. But now I saw that it’d be easy. Anyone who was reasonably agile could stand on the railing of the balcony below and pull himself up to Chloe’s balcony. And the area was pretty much sheltered from view. The carport was at the other end of the building, and the houses behind it didn’t have windows facing this way.
I went back inside. “When did you go back to sleep?”
“I stayed up for another ten minutes or so after Dale left. So around two a.m., I guess.”
“After Dale left, did you hear anyone else come to their apartment?”
“No.”
Janet’s son came back into the room. “You’re all set, Mom.” He shook his head at us. “You know, before that cop got arrested, I thought the killer would turn out to be that guy in 212.”
“Who’s that?”
Janet pursed her lips together. “A drug dealer. Everyone knows it, but they’re all afraid to call the police.”
“Did you ever call them?”
“No. I’m just an old woman living alone. Who knows what he’d do if he found out I’d reported him?”
The son spoke up. “I told her not to. There’s no point in her taking a risk like that. The cops aren’t going to bust him just because my mother thinks he’s a drug dealer.”