by David Freed
I’d wait.
In the golf shop below, a clerk in beige golf shorts with long dark hair, lively eyes and a name tag in Korean pinned to her fuchsia-colored Callaway golf shirt, tried to sell me a $350 titanium putter, the head of which was only slightly smaller than a land-mine detector.
“The stainless steel head has a thicker face and top line,” she said in an accent that was more Sherman Oaks than Seoul, “so the feel is a lot more solid when you make contact with the ball. It’ll take three strokes off your game, guaranteed.”
I took the club if only to humor her and made a few practice putts while keeping an eye on the street.
“Sole weights at the heel and toe,” she said, “so you can change the head weight however you like. Sweet, right?”
“Very.” I handed her back the putter.
“I’ll make you a great deal. Even throw in a free cover, because if you take care of your putter, it’ll take care of you.” She smiled, her tongue flicking the side of her mouth provocatively.
“I don’t play golf.”
“Just learning?”
“No. Actually, golf seems like a giant waste of time to me.”
She looked at me funny. “But this a golf shop.”
“So it would appear.”
“Why come in if you don’t play golf?”
“I’m waiting for the guy who lives upstairs to come home. His name’s Jethro Murtha. You wouldn’t happen to know him, would you?”
The clerk thought hard for a second. “Big dude. Kinda angry all the time. Got these little tats . . .” She tapped her left cheekbone.
“Teardrops?”
The clerk nodded.
“You a cop?”
“Do I look like a cop?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
I thanked her for her time and told her I’d definitely be back if I ever got into the game of golf. We both knew that would be never.
There was a donut place two doors to the west, past a dry cleaners and a cash-only dental office. The lady behind the counter was friendly in a minimum-wage kind of way. She wore a hairnet. I ordered a plain cake donut and a small coffee.
When I returned to my truck, there was a parking ticket under the left windshield wiper. Expired meter: sixty-three dollar fine.
“Proud to be an American.”
I stuffed the ticket in my jeans, wolfed down my donut, transferred what change I had in my pocket into the meter, and tried hard not to think about Savannah as I sat behind the wheel, watching the approaches to Murtha’s apartment. I checked my phone for any calls I might have missed, but there were none.
At 5:20, an orange and silver MTA bus rumbled by and pulled into the stop up the block. Two Asian girls stepped off, giggling teenagers, followed by an older Asian woman, and a hulking construction worker of about thirty-five with a shaved head and a tool belt slung over his shoulder. He walked past my truck with tired, downturned eyes. He was lugging a plastic bag filled with groceries. The teardrops tattooed above both of his cheekbones were easy to spot.
I got out and fell in behind him.
“Jethro, you got a second?”
He glanced over his shoulder at me, dropped his groceries, and bolted.
In my prime, I would’ve caught him easily. Not even broken a sweat. But the years can rob a man of speed, along with his desire to achieve it. I stopped and watched him grow smaller as he fled down the sidewalk, glancing back at me periodically, his billiard ball head bobbing above a sea of Asian pedestrians along Olympic Boulevard.
I picked up the bag he’d jettisoned and looked inside: a box of Froot Loops, a dozen dinner rolls, two cans of tomato soup, and a plastic jug of cheap, off-brand vodka.
Jethro would be back for the booze. I was pretty sure of that.
I LEFT his groceries, less the vodka, in the bag outside his door above the golf shop, parked my truck in a twelve-dollar-a-day lot two blocks away, and established an observation post inside a KFC almost directly across the boulevard from his apartment. Nobody would question my presence or kick me out as long as I was a paying customer, so I ordered a bucket of original recipe chicken and a soda with free refills. I was gnawing four hours later on a thigh, floating in a somewhat uncomfortable ether of salt, processed sugar, and saturated fat, when the ex-con I was eager to speak with came home.
He approached his apartment with an almost vaudevillian wariness, slowly looking this way and that, like a big cat slinking toward a watering hole, before cautiously ascending the stairs to his apartment. The top of the stairs was obscured from my vantage point at the KFC, but I knew that he’d gone inside because interior lights came on behind the shades in the two small windows over the golf shop.
I waited about fifteen minutes for him to settle in, wiped the grease from my mouth and hands on a half-dozen moist KFC towelettes, fetched Murtha’s jug of vodka from my truck, and returned to his apartment.
The grocery bag I’d left on his stoop was gone. Either he’d taken it inside when he’d returned home, or someone had stolen it. I climbed the stairs slowly, quietly, my eyes trained on the door above me, pausing every few seconds to listen. Amid the urban cacophony of cars, jetliners, and the faint, sing-song strains of people conversing in Korean, I could make out twangy country music coming from Murtha’s place—Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee.”
I rapped my knuckles on the door, careful to stand well to the side, lest I be greeted with a shotgun blast.
The tune inside stopped. The windows went dark.
I waited, then knocked once more.
No answer.
“If I were a cop, Jethro, do you really think I would’ve picked up your groceries and left them for you?”
Silence.
“I just want to talk,” I said.
Five seconds passed.
“About what?” came a voice from the other side of the door.
“Chad Lovejoy.”
“I don’t know no Chad Lovejoy.”
“You know that vodka you bought?”
“Wouldn’t know nothing about that, either.”
“Good. Then I guess I’ll have to drink it myself.”
More silence. Then the door opened with the security chain in place. Murtha eyed me up and down through the crack. He spied the jug of vodka in my hand.
“You got any ID on you?”
I slipped him my driver’s license and a business card. The door closed.
“A flight instructor?” I could hear him slip the chain off. The door opened wide. “You’re a flight instructor?”
“I am.”
“Hell,” he said, standing there in his stocking feet. “I was thinking about taking some flying lessons. Soon as I save me some money.”
“Come up to Rancho Bonita. We’ll make a pilot out of you.”
“What’s this about Chad?”
“Can I come in?”
Murtha glanced at the vodka jug in my hand.
I gave it to him.
“Welcome,” he said, stepping back with a grand, exaggerated sweep of his hand, “to the Taj-fucking-Mahal.”
His apartment was one room. Toilet and shower stall partitioned by a hanging green bed sheet. Soiled clothes strewn about the floor. A brown corduroy foldout couch, a card table and two folding chairs. A red velvet recliner that looked like it had been retrieved from some curbside. A Lynyrd Skynyrd poster. A fifty-inch flat screen TV resting on cinder blocks.
“Nice crib you got here, Jethro.”
“Yeah, right. Have a seat.”
I parked myself at his card table while he fished a chipped blue ceramic coffee cup out of the sink, rinsed it out, and filled it with vodka.
“You want one?”
“No, thanks. Why’d you run from me?”
“Thought you was parole. Didn’t feel like getting piss-tested today.” He gulped some vodka. “What’s so important, you hanging around here for four hours, wanting to talk to me about Chad?”
“I was hoping you’d tell me.�
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He wiped his mouth with the back of his left hand. “The little prick didn’t tell you I still owed him money, did he?”
I said nothing, studying Murtha’s face and body language, looking for signs of obfuscation. I saw none.
“Chad’s dead,” I said.
He paused in midgulp and chuckled, like he thought I was kidding around.
“Sure he is.”
“Outside Lake Tahoe. He was shot. A little more than a week ago.”
Murtha studied me.
“Are you bullshitting me? He got shot?”
I nodded.
“Shit.” Murtha downed the rest of his drink, refilled it, and settled into his red recliner, making a face like his lower back hurt. “I should’ve seen it coming, man.”
I said nothing.
More than a month had gone by since they’d last spoken, Murtha said. Chad had called to tell him that he’d been hired by his uncle Gordon at minimum wage, catering to rich assholes at the Lake Tahoe airport. Chad had said he hated the work.
“I told him, ‘Hey, at least you got a job,’ ” Murtha said. “Steady work for ex-cons, that don’t come along every day, you know?”
I nodded.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Murtha said, “Chad wasn’t complaining none. He said his uncle was letting him sleep on a cot where they keep the airplanes or some shit. Wasn’t even charging him nothing to stay. Free rent. Beer money. Sounded like a pretty sweet setup to me. But, like I said, I didn’t see it coming. Should’ve said something to him. Only I didn’t, goddammit.”
“Tell him what, Jethro?”
“To watch his back. His uncle Gordon? The dude’s dirty as they come. Up to all kinds of nasty shit.”
“How do you know that?”
“Chad told me.” Murtha propped his hands behind his head and his feet on the floor in front him, facing me directly—body language that conveyed openness. “I’ll tell you something else he told me, too. You know Iran?”
“I’ve heard of it a time or two.”
“Yeah, well, Chad’s uncle, he’s running some kind of scam with some hardcore Iranian dudes living up there in Tahoe. It had Chad freaked the fuck out.”
“What kind of scam?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. Too scared.” Murtha lit a Camel, exhaled smoke through his nose, and eyed me through blue tobacco haze. “So what are you doing here, anyway, Mr. . . . Logan, is it?” he said, glancing at the business card I’d given him. “Chad worked at an airport. You’re a flight instructor. That tells me something.”
“It tells you nothing.” I got up and headed for the door. “Thanks for your time, Jethro.”
“I’m definitely interested in taking flying lessons,” he said. “Soon as I make some bank.”
“Or rob one.”
“Exactly.”
He grinned as I left.
SO CHAD Lovejoy’s Uncle Gordon was up to no good. I’d wondered about him all along. Murtha’s insights gave me new direction, new hope, a viable lead to follow. Walking to my truck, I was feeling reenergized, almost exuberant, when my phone rang.
“Logan.”
“It’s Matt Streeter.”
I could feel my pulse quicken.
“What’s up, Deputy?”
He asked me where I was.
“I’m in LA. Why?”
“How soon can you make it up to Lake Tahoe?”
His voice sounded different, an odd flatness to it.
“Why?”
“I’d prefer we talk in person.”
“I’d prefer we talk now.”
Streeter paused, as if gathering his courage.
“We’ve located some remains.”
SEVENTEEN
With the Duck still suffering electrical system issues and out of commission, I drove through the night as fast as my truck would carry me from Los Angeles to South Lake Tahoe. Four hundred and eighty miles. Nearly seven hours, excluding two brief pit stops for octane and caffeine. I focused on the far reaches of my headlights and fought to keep submerged the anguish that threatened to overwhelm me.
The drive was no scenic tour. The Golden State Freeway, which constituted more than three quarters of the route, runs the length of California’s semiarid Central Valley like a concrete spine. In daylight, it is a featureless, litter-strewn highway upon which most everyone flagrantly ignores the posted speed limit, anxious to escape as fast as possible the wasteland surrounding them. Driving the route in darkness might seem a blessing—but not when the eyes and brain are denied distraction. A man can keep his thoughts in neutral for only so long before his mind automatically slips back into gear.
Please God, Buddha, Allah. Don’t let it be my woman.
I passed a tractor trailer, a Kenworth, hauling a load of lemons. The lemons reminded me of the time a few weeks after we were first married when Savannah decided to bake me a meringue pie and left it in the oven too long. It looked like something left over from Hiroshima. She laughed at my teasing, a good sport, then went into the bathroom, locked the door, and sobbed. It was the last time she ever baked me anything.
I shouldn‘t have said what I said. You were doing something nice for me and I was a complete jerk. I’m sorry, Savannah. For what I did. For everything I didn’t do.
The road ahead seemed to blur. For a second, I thought the windshield had fogged up. Then I realized I was crying. I wiped away the tears angrily and drove on.
A light snow was falling as I turned off the freeway near Elk Grove onto US 50, south of what was once Mather Air Force Base, and began climbing into the rising sun. The highway remained ice-free for the most part, even as the weather turned colder. Air temperature lapses an average three and a half degrees for every thousand feet of altitude gained. I can’t say how cold it was on the valley floor a mile below me, but by the time I reached South Lake Tahoe a little before 0700, the digital thermometer outside Alpine Bank and Trust on the town’s far western approach showed eighteen degrees.
Streeter wanted me to contact him as soon as I pulled into town. I called from the bank’s parking lot. He was there inside of five minutes. He got out of his Jeep and into my truck with a manila file folder under his right arm, his expression grim.
“Thank you for coming up. I know it’s a long way on short notice.”
I nodded.
His jaw muscles were tight. He wouldn’t make eye contact. He no more wanted to do what we were about to do than I did.
“It’s all right,” I said. “Just tell me.”
He nodded, appreciative of my straightforwardness, and gazed down at the file folder now resting on his left thigh.
“Some of these pictures may be very graphic in nature to you. I apologize in advance.”
“I’ve been to a few rodeos,” I said as evenly as I could.
He hesitated, then handed me the folder.
I opened it. I had to force myself to breathe.
The first photos were of a woman’s sweater, a bra, a pair of panties, and a pair of brown suede boots. They’d all been badly burned.
“Do you recognize any of those garments?” Streeter asked.
“No.”
After the pictures of clothing came autopsy photos, more than a dozen in all. They were of a dead woman. Like her clothes, she, too, had been burned. What was left of her hair appeared to be dark red, like Savannah’s. Her face was charred, unrecognizable. Her nose was gone. Her eyes were gone. The jaw was parted. The teeth were white and perfect. Like Savannah’s.
“Where did you find her?”
“Down a ravine, south of town. A car caught fire. She didn’t have any ID on her. We’re having some trouble getting good prints, given the extent of injury. I figured you’d want to know.”
I flipped slowly through the photos. Burned hands. Long, elegant fingers, like Savannah’s. Burgundy fingernails, like hers. Burned legs. Blackened arms. The limbs really didn’t look like Savannah’s. Or did they? I couldn’t be certain. Nausea floated up from my stomac
h. I let out a breath, struggling to remain focused, trying not to cry.
“Were you able to establish a cause of death?”
“Not yet.”
“Was she violated sexually?”
“We won’t know that until the coroner comes back with his full results.”
A photo of the left leg caught my attention. A patch of skin on the inside of her upper thigh had been spared from the flames that had consumed much of the rest of her. When Savannah was a teenager, long before it had become a social requirement that every young person in America get tattooed, Savannah had gotten inked—a small, delicate red rose that took me by surprise when I first discovered it, kissing my way up her leg.
“You don’t strike me as the provocative, renegade type,” I told her at the time.
“You want provocative?” she said alluringly, both of us naked. “I’ll show you provocative.”
And then, to my great pleasure, she did.
I held up the photo of the leg and looked closer:
There was no tattoo. I suddenly felt light-headed.
“This isn’t Savannah.”
“Are you sure?”
I explained to Streeter why I was.
He sat back and exhaled. He seemed almost more relieved than I was, but I doubted it.
It was possible, he said, that the woman in the photographs hadn’t met with foul play, that she’d simply lost control of her car on a patch of ice and rolled into the ditch where her car caught fire. It happens all the time in winter, in the mountains.
“I’m sorry you had to go through this,” he said. “It’s just, we had to know.”
I told him what Jethro Murtha, the ex-con, had passed along to me about Chad Lovejoy’s uncle, airport executive Gordon Priest, and Murtha’s assertion that Priest was involved in some sort of scam with Iranian immigrants living in the Tahoe area.
“Did he tell you that Priest or these Iranians killed Chad?” Streeter asked.
“All he said was that Chad found out what Priest was up to and that Chad was spooked. I’m pretty certain he didn’t know the kid was dead until I told him.”
“I do not want you approaching Gordon Priest. Let us do our job. Is that understood?”