by JF Freedman
The girl’s story only took a few minutes. Rebeck sat up straight, listening intently. When the girl was finished, Rebeck grabbed her cell phone and dialed.
“It’s me,” she said. “Good thing I caught you in. We just got a nice juicy plum dumped in our laps. Get here as soon as you can, and bring Tyler Woodruff’s interview with you.” She hung up. “My partner is on his way in,” she told the girl. “I’d like him to hear this. And we will want to take a formal statement from you.”
A few more minutes passed. Rebeck and the girl sat in Rebeck’s office. A couple of detectives stuck their heads in the door to see what was up, but Rebeck shooed them away.
Watson came shuffling in. He was dressed as usual, Joe Friday-style. “Sorry,” he apologized perfunctorily. “There was a fender bender on 101.” He had Tyler Woodruff’s transcript in his hand. “What’s up?”
The girl told him what she had told Rebeck: she had seen Maria Estrada and a boy walking out of Paseo Nuevo. His arm was around her shoulder, and they were smiling at each other. They crossed Chapala Street, and got into his car.
“You’re positive it was Maria,” Rebeck said. She had asked this question already, and gotten an affirmative answer, but she wanted Watson to hear it from the source.
“Yes,” the girl said firmly. “It was her.”
Watson eyeballed the girl. She didn’t seem to have an agenda, but you never know. “Why didn’t you come forward with this information earlier?” he asked her.
The girl shrugged. “I wasn’t thinking that much about it. Then I saw something on the news the other day about Maria being in the mall that day, and I remembered. So I thought I should tell somebody.”
“Okay,” Watson said. He took Steven’s picture out of his file and laid it on the desk in front of the girl. He was walking a fine line by doing this—it could be construed as improperly influencing the witness—but he decided that with everything else they had, he could get away with it. “Is this the boy she was with?” he asked.
The girl stared at the picture. “It looks like him,” she said, after staring at the photo for a few moments. “He had his back to me mostly, and I didn’t know him. I knew Maria, that’s how come I know it was her. I think it’s him, but I’m not sure,” she said apologetically.
“That’s all right,” Rebeck assured her.
Watson put Steven’s picture back into the file. “This car they got into. What kind was it?” he asked.
“An SUV.”
“What make?” Watson continued, as he thumbed through the interview.
She scrunched up her eyes, thinking. “I’m not sure. I don’t know cars that good.”
“But you definitely saw them get in.”
“Yes.”
“Then what?”
“They drove away. Up Chapala.”
“Which leads to Carillo, which leads to the freeway,” Rebeck noted, her voice rising in excitement. “Which leads to Highway 154.”
He nodded. “What about the color?”
“It was dark. Dark gray, or blue,” she answered.
Watson scanned the transcript until he found what he was looking for. He read out loud. “Question, me: Whose car were you and Steven using, his or yours? Answer, Woodruff: His. Question: What make? Answer: A Nissan Pathfinder. Question: Color? Answer: It’s blue. Dark blue, like navy.”
He looked up. Rebeck was smiling, a gotcha shit-eating grin. Watson smiled, too, although not as broadly.
The girl looked from one cop to the other. “Is that all right?” she asked. “Does that help you?”
Rebeck put a reassuring hand on the girl’s forearm. “Yes,” she answered warmly. “It certainly does.”
They wrote down the girl’s information. After she left, Rebeck let out a whoop. “Is that icing on the cake, or what?”
“If it stands up,” Watson said, immediately raining on her parade.
“You think she’s lying?” Rebeck asked with incredulity.
“I don’t know,” he answered evenly. That was one thing about him—he was never too up or too down. A good quality in a cop.
Rebeck hated getting crapped on, but her partner was right—they had to be careful not to be blinded by their own euphoria. “Why would she?”
“Who knows? Publicity, wanting to be part of something important.” Watson looked at the notes he’d made of the girl’s statement. “It’s public info that Maria was in the mall, and finding out what kind of car McCoy drove wouldn’t be hard to do.” He tapped his fingers on the notes. “Her reason for not coming to us with this until now doesn’t feel completely legit, either.”
Rebeck recoiled visibly. “Are you saying she might be a setup?”
“It isn’t likely,” Watson answered carefully, “but it could be.”
“Who would do that?”
“Whoever wants to nail McCoy’s coffin shut.” He paused. “Or deflect attention from anyone else.”
She stared at him, hard. “We have our killer.”
“I think so, too,” he agreed. “But we’d better not blind ourselves to other possibilities. We sure as shit don’t want this to blow up in our faces.”
Luke spread the pile of burning coals across the grate of his barbeque. The mesquite had burned down to a fine whiteness. He was cooking tri-tips. They would take about an hour. Riva had recently gotten him a gas barbeque at Home Depot that had every bell and whistle under the sun, but he preferred grilling over charcoal when he had the time, particularly when he was cooking for a lot of people, chuck-wagon style. The taste of food cooked over real charcoal was always better than gas. Gas was fine during the week, when he was late getting home from the office and wanted to fast-cook steaks, chicken breasts, or halibut, but today he was taking life slow and mellow.
It was Saturday, late afternoon. From their house’s vantage point on the Riviera, the city below them lay bathed in warm, long-shadow sunlight. This was the last full weekend until the end of daylight saving time, which marked the official closure of outdoor-cooking season.
A couple dozen people (and their kids) had been invited over; they had been drifting in for the past half hour. Everyone was clustering on the spacious deck, eating guacamole and boiled-in-beer shrimp, drinking beer and wine (lemonade for the kids), waiting until it was time to dig into the roast, potato salad, coleslaw, and rice. It was a motley bunch—a few old lawyer buddies and their wives/husbands, a lesbian couple he had known since his prosecution days (one of them was a lawyer he partnered up with occasionally), and a bunch of newer friends, parents of kids who went to school with their kids. That’s what their social life revolved around now—their children. Everyone Luke knew who had small kids was in the same boat, which suited him fine. He’d never been happier.
Kate Blanchard drifted over to the grill. One hand was wrapped around the neck of a cold Sierra Nevada, the other held a paper plate loaded up with chips and dip.
“Good-looking tips,” she commented of the slabs of beef on the grill. She chugged down some beer. “If you get tired of lawyering you could become a caterer.”
Luke smiled at her. “Exchange one unhappy set of clients for another? No, thanks.”
“Need any help?” she volunteered.
“Naw, I’m okay. The hard part’s all done now.” He looked past her. “Did you bring a date?”
She shook her head. “I’m single tonight. Unless my daughter shows up later.”
Luke pushed the tri-tips around on the grill to keep them from sticking to the hot metal. “Where is she?”
“Taking a riding lesson,” Kate answered. “At Juanita McCoy’s ranch. Juanita’s teaching her how to be an authentic Santa Barbara cowgirl.”
Luke’s eyebrows raised. “She’s out there on the ranch? Where Steven McCoy’s staying?”
Kate nodded. “Uh huh.”
“You’re cool with that?”
“Not completely. But I don’t like to tell her how to run her life. She’s a pretty independent girl. And she has her head screwed on right most
of the time, knock wood.”
Luke frowned. “Even so, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said.
“Are you worried about her?” Kate asked. He had pushed her alarm button, the one she had fought earlier to suppress.
“No,” he answered. “I’m thinking more about Steven, about him being around a girl who’s the same age as the one he’s accused of killing. The press or the D.A. gets hold of that, it could make our lives messier.” He started flipping the hunks of meat over. “Which we don’t need, we’re messed up enough with this case already.” He took a hit off his beer. “Why don’t you go hang with Riva?” he suggested. “She was saying the other day how she’d like to see you more often.”
“Me, too,” Kate said. She knocked her beer bottle against his. “Cook ’em good, partner.”
She walked over to Riva, who was sitting at a wrought-iron table with her two-year-old daughter perched on her knee. Riva smiled as Kate sat down next to her.
“How are you?” Riva asked warmly. “Long time no see.”
“It’s been hectic.” Kate dipped some guacamole onto a chip and offered it up to little Claire. “Is it okay?” she asked.
“Sure.”
The girl had her mother’s dark, exotic looks. She opened her mouth like a sightless baby bird, and Kate slipped the chip in. God, how long had it been since one of hers was this tiny, she thought? The days go slow, but the years fly by.
Riva leaned back in her chair, catching the dying rays on her face. “It’s such a nice day,” she said dreamily. “I’m glad you could come.”
“Me, too.”
“No man tonight?” Riva asked.
“No man,” Kate answered.
For a long time, not having a man in her life felt good, liberating. She had made some bad choices in that area, and she needed space to regroup and rejuvenate. But that was getting old. She wasn’t looking for love, or even a hot romance, but it would be nice to get laid. She couldn’t remember the last time she had gone this long without sex.
She looked over at Riva, whose little girl was cuddling up against her. She has it made, Kate thought with a pang of jealousy. Luke was one of the good guys, a true prize. Once in a while, when she lay in bed at night bringing herself off with her fingers, she conjured him up. It was always satisfying.
But that was all that would happen with Luke—a solitary, nighttime fantasy. She’d had affairs with married men and had not regretted them, nor had she felt any guilt, either for herself or for their wives. She was certain that human beings were not naturally monogamous. They stayed faithful to their mates because of social pressures and fear of discovery. And occasionally, as seemed to be the case with Luke and Riva, because of love and knowing that nothing out there was any better, or even as good.
She didn’t sleep with married men anymore, though. Not because of them, but because of her. She had decided that if she had sex with a man she wanted the possibility of something more—a relationship. Not that one might happen, but that it could, that there was the chance. Unfortunately, she hadn’t met any single men who turned her on. There weren’t that many around who qualified, and she didn’t have the time to pursue them, should one arise. Maybe there was a surprise around the next corner—that would be nice—but she had reconciled herself to being alone and celibate until next year, when Sophia was at college.
That was another thing. She didn’t want Sophia to wake up and find a strange man coming out of her mother’s bedroom. There had been instances of that in the past. It had always felt dirty.
“I wish I knew someone to fix you up with,” Riva said, breaking into her imaginings. “But I don’t know any decent men around here except the fathers of Buck and Claire’s playmates, and they’re all attached. None of them are your type, anyway.”
“Thanks, but I’m not in the market right now anyway,” Kate told her. “I don’t have time for a hot new romance.”
“But if one were to drop into your lap,” Riva teased her.
“I’d try not to fumble it.”
She drank the rest of her beer. It was warm. She got up and helped herself to another one from the Igloo. If she wound up drinking too much she would take a cab home and get her car in the morning. Even without a partner, she was going to have fun tonight.
Sophia showed up as Luke was slicing the tri-tip. Her face and arms were bronzed from being out in the sun. “Hey,” she said, giving her mother a peck on the cheek as she got in line to fill a plate. “Smells good.”
“You got here in the nick of time,” Kate told her. “Have you been at the ranch all day? You’re three shades darker. You remembered to put plenty of lotion on, didn’t you?”
Sophia nodded. “It was glorious out there, Mom. Just like in the western movies, but a million times better. And yes, I was slathered in SPF 30, don’t worry. Juanita made sure of that. She’s been putting sunscreen on for fifty years, even before they found out the sun was bad for you. It’s why she hardly has any wrinkles, even though she’s old.”
They carried their food to one of the tables, sitting down next to Riva, who was cutting up a piece of meat for Claire. “She’s a smart cookie,” Kate agreed. “So how did the lesson go?”
“Super,” Sophia beamed. “Juanita says I’m a natural.”
“So you’ve told me. Both of you.”
“I’m going out again next weekend. I love it out there.”
Luke plunked down next to Riva. He had made up plates of food for both of them. “Where’s the Buckmeister?” he asked.
“With his buddies,” she said, pointing with her fork to a table across from them, where half a dozen boys, aged six to ten, were chowing down. “Fraternity row.”
“Ah so,” he said, smiling. God, how fast they grow up, he thought. He looked at Sophia. It couldn’t have been too many years ago that she was his son’s age. Now she was a woman. “Glad you could make it,” he told her. “Your mom says you’ve been out at the McCoy ranch, taking horseback-riding lessons.”
“Yes, I have,” she answered.
“I’ll bet Mrs. McCoy’s a good teacher.” He cut into his tri-tip.
“She’s really good. I’ve learned so much in such a short time.”
Luke asked the question Kate had wanted to ask but had been afraid to. “Did you see Steven McCoy out there?”
Sophia nodded. “He was out in one of the pastures, helping Juanita’s foreman fix a fence. We talked to them.”
“You talked to him?” Kate blurted out.
Sophia looked at her with puzzlement. “Yeah, Mom. It would’ve been rude not to, wouldn’t it?”
“So you and Juanita McCoy rode right up to them and had a conversation?” Luke asked, keeping his tone light, the question almost a throwaway.
“Yes.” Sophia took a bite of tri-tip. “This is delicious, Mr. Garrison.”
“Thanks. And it’s Luke, to you. For how long?”
“Did we talk? I don’t know. A couple of minutes, I guess.” Sophia looked at her mother. “Is there something wrong?”
Kate thought for a moment. “It’s not about right or wrong, Sophia,” she said carefully. This was a potential minefield. “It’s about appearances.”
“Because he’s been accused of murder?”
Luke answered for Kate. “Yes.”
“But he didn’t do it.” Sophia looked from Luke to her mother. “Isn’t that right? So why shouldn’t I be able to talk to him?”
Kate had no answer. She turned to Luke.
Luke skirted Sophia’s question. “It would be better if you didn’t have any contact at all with Steven McCoy, for his own good. He needs to not only be completely clean, he needs to appear that he is. I’m not going to go into his bail conditions with you, but they’re tight. If the police went out there, which they can and will do without notice, and saw him with you or any girl, even if there were other people around, it would look bad for him.”
Sophia stared at him. “That’s stupid.”
“It i
s,” Luke agreed. “But that’s how it is.”
Sophia pushed away from the table. “I’m not going to stop taking riding lessons, Mom,” she told Kate stubbornly. “You can’t make me.”
“I don’t want you to stop,” Kate said. She felt miserable about this. “I want you to use common sense, though. You can take riding lessons from Juanita without having anything to do with Steven.” She took Sophia’s hand. “Come on. Eat your food. Let’s have a good time. We’ll deal with this later.”
“So I can keep going?” Sophia asked. She wanted to nail this down.
Luke smiled at her. “Of course you can. Like your mother says—use discretion. You wouldn’t want him to get into any more trouble than he already has, would you?”
“No,” Sophia answered. She thought back to the feeling that had come upon her like a fast-rising fever when she saw Steven out in the field, his shirt off, his body tight and gleaming with sweat like a young, oiled god. She didn’t want to get him into any more trouble. She didn’t want to get herself into trouble, either.
“I wouldn’t want to,” she told Luke and her mother. What she actually didn’t want, she left unsaid.
Luke drove out to the ranch Monday morning. He sat at Juanita McCoy’s kitchen table with her and Steven.
“I’ll make this short, sweet, and clear,” he told them. There was no smile in his voice, as there usually was when he talked to Juanita. “You need to stay clear of Sophia Blanchard or any girl, or any woman, who comes out here,” he said, staring at Steven. “No exceptions. Is that understood?”
Steven looked back at him with flat eyes. “What about the lady cop who comes out here to check up on me? Her, too?”
“Don’t get cute on me,” Luke shot back at him. “I’m not in the mood. Anyone other than cops or other officials who have business with you.”
Steven didn’t break eye contact. “Why am I being treated like a leper?” he complained. “I didn’t do anything. Isn’t it bad enough that I’m going on trial for a murder I didn’t commit, that I’m missing my senior year of college, that I’m probably fucked from ever going to med school, even when I’m acquitted? What about my rights?”