Some receptionist.
Then, at 11:31, the phone system routed her a call for the inquiry line.
“DeForest, this is Erin, how may I help you?”
“You know the B&B Market on Moorpark?”
The voice. He said he would call.
“Did you understand the question, Erin?”
“What do you want?”
“Do you know the B&B?”
“I … no.”
“Erin, please don’t do that. Don’t lie to me. I wasn’t asking. I know you get salads there quite often.”
The sense of violation was as real as the heat coming through the reception-area windows.
“Go there,” he said. “Be there in fifteen minutes.”
“I can’t.”
“You will go to the pay phone there. I will call you. And remember, I’m here to help you! God, if you only knew. So don’t call the cops, because if they show up you won’t see your son ever again, and that would be too sad. Okay? Don’t be late.”
The call cut off.
“Hey.” Yumiko’s voice made Erin jump. She had completely missed her friend’s approach.
Yumiko said, “You okay?”
“I have to go out,” Erin said, removing the receptionist ear piece. “Can you cover for me?”
“Sure, but—”
“I’m in a hurry.”
“What’s this about?”
But Erin had already stood and grabbed her purse. She uttered a terse “Thanks” and headed for the elevators.
She got there the same time as one of the students, a single mom named Sandy McCallister.
“Hi, Erin.”
“Oh. Hi.” Erin hit the down button.
“I was hoping I’d run into you,” Sandy said.
“Oh?”
“I was wondering what I have to do to finish my class next semester. My little girl needs surgery and …”
The elevator doors opened. Feeling like a complete jerk, Erin stepped in and said, “We have a continuance form online.” She hit the button for the parking garage.
“I saw that,” Sandy said, “but there’s a fee, and I was wondering if that could be waived.”
“I’m sorry, Sandy, I’m in a hurry.” The doors started to close. “Let’s talk when I get back.”
On the way down, Erin loathed herself for shining on a student like that. But even more did she loathe that she was a plaything for the voice on the phone.
But what choice was there? The scent of Kyle’s clothes was still fresh, bringing with it the faint whiff of hope that she might see him again. It was enough to put all things behind her until she knew for sure if he was still alive.
And that would mean, she knew, the setting aside of some fundamental human niceties.
So be it.
The elevator opened up to the parking garage.
Erin’s hand shook as she fumbled in her purse for the car key.
43
What Dylan knew best about Sam Wyant was his right hip. Dylan had been working on it once a month for two years. The best bit of advice Dylan had given to the sixty-year-old attorney was to opt out of the law firm basketball league and take up golf. A suggestion Wyant always rejected with the sentiment, “Too slow a game. I need the juice.”
Dylan also learned along the way that Wyant was one of the most successful, and expensive, criminal defense lawyers in Los Angeles. But gratis one day Sam Wyant gave Dylan this advice: “First rule is, don’t ever get arrested. Second rules is, don’t get arrested. Third rule is, if you do get arrested, keep your big mouth shut and call me.”
Well, he’d already blown those commandments. But at least Wyant had come to see him immediately. They were at the station, in the same interview room where Smith had hammered him. Dylan, after a sleepless night in a cell, and with his head still throbbing, felt—and smelled—like a dumpster in back of a fish market.
Sam Wyant, on the other hand, smelled like a freshly scented emperor of Rome.
Wyant was medium height, shaved-head bald, his pate as hard and shiny as a Spartan’s shield. The black-rimmed glasses softened his look, adding a monk’s piety to the warrior’s eyes. But his salt-and-pepper goatee was in fighting trim, and Dylan got the impression that if he touched the fabric of Wyant’s three-piece, slate-gray suit, it would feel like iron mail.
All of which was a relief. Dylan needed a fighter on his side, and probably a magician, too. One who could pull street-smart rabbits out of a hat.
Sam Wyant shook Dylan’s hand and at the same time placed his leather briefcase on the table.
“I didn’t do this,” Dylan said, as Wyant sat in the chair opposite him.
“Who hit you?” Wyant said.
“Guy with a gun,” Dylan said, touching the puffiness with his index finger.
“They treat you?”
“They gave me this.” Dylan showed him the used cold pack they’d handed him before putting him back in lockup. It felt like a dead squirrel in his hand.
“You want another one?” Wyant said.
“I want to get out of here,” Dylan said. “This whole thing is crazy. I didn’t kill anybody.”
“Then let’s see where we are,” Wyant said. He popped open the briefcase and took out a yellow legal pad and pen. He closed the briefcase and clicked the pen, then scribbled something at the top of the pad.
Dylan said, “Do we need to talk fee?”
“Of course,” Wyant said. “But not now. This is an initial consultation, and it costs you nothing. You know that it’s confidential, right? Anything you say to me stays with me. I’m like a walking, talking Las Vegas. And you’re lucky to have me.”
“I always knew you were confident.”
“You know vertebrae, I know juries. You crack bones, I try cases. And I win.”
Certainly true, that. Sam Wyant rose to prominence around the same time Dylan hung out his shingle in L.A. A star running back for the USC Trojans, Terrell Skyles, a Heisman Trophy frontrunner, had been charged with the rape of a seventeen-year-old high school student. It looked like the end of a promising career, not to mention first-round NFL-draft money. Nor was Skyles the most likable defendant. He had a record of disciplinary problems stretching back to his small-town Texas middle school.
The USC administration distanced itself from Skyles. Dylan remembered that part vividly. They suspended Skyles without a hearing or any chance to defend himself.
Since the alleged attack took place at a party in Brentwood, the L.A. District Attorney, having learned the lessons of the O. J. Simpson murder trial, ordered that the case be tried in Santa Monica.
Everyone knew what that meant—mostly white jurors.
The alleged victim was white, too.
Which was why Terrell Skyles’s management team hired a white lawyer named Sam Wyant.
And in the face of all the negative publicity and the almost nightly denunciations on cable TV, Sam Wyant won an outright acquittal. He did it by breaking down one of the supposed eye witnesses on cross-examination, gaining an admission that the whole thing had been a setup to try to extort money from a rising star.
The press, tail between its legs, had to admit it was a stunning courtroom triumph. “A Perry Mason moment,” the L.A. Daily News called it. And in an ironic and humorous twist, the L.A. Weekly did a follow-up interview with Skyles who, at one point, asked, “Who is Perry Mason?”
From there, Sam Wyant had gone on to represent actors, record company executives, Beverly Hills housewives with prenups, and one Los Angeles County Supervisor caught on video taking a bribe in a hotel room, looking at an open attache case of cash and chirping, “Merry Christmas to me!” Wyant got him off by convincing a jury it was entrapment by overzealous feds who should have been after home-grown terrorists.
So while Dylan was slightly relieved he had Sam Wyant in his corner, he was not taking anything for granted.
Dylan said, “You know me. You know I couldn’t do this.”
Wyant held his
pen between his thumb and forefinger. “I’ll tell you what the prosecutor would say. He would say that you were in a romantic relationship with Ms. Tabitha Mullaney and you were at her house where she was found dead. You were surprised by a private investigator who was watching the house because Ms. Mullaney was afraid of you—”
“What!”
“—and oh yes, you pulled a gun on this man.”
Dylan was not one for swearing, but he did so now.
Wyant said, “Those words and a couple of bucks will get you a cup of coffee.”
“But don’t I have to have a motive?”
“Motive is not an element of the crime of murder.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Do I look like I’m kidding? I’ll let you know when I’m kidding, and it won’t be any time soon. Clear?”
Dylan closed his eyes and absently put the dead cold pack on the side of his face.
“A motive strengthens the case for the prosecution,” Sam Wyant said. “The jury can infer a motive.”
“Like what?”
Wyant said. “Why don’t you tell me how you met.”
44
She pulled into the parking lot of the strip mall. B&B Market took up most of one corner. The pay phone was outside the front doors, next to an old Daily News newspaper dispenser that was faded and empty.
But as she got out of the car, a guy with long stringy hair, no shirt, and ratty pants went to the phone and shoved in some coins.
Erin looked at her watch. Three minutes until the call would come in.
She hurried to the phone just as the guy was putting in another coin and said, “Can I ask you to wait?”
The guy, holding the phone to his ear, glared at her. His deeply-tanned face and unkempt beard glistened with sweat and the greasy dirtiness of the street dweller. He had a bright red eruption on his left cheek, an infection of some kind. Erin tried not to look at it but it was like trying not to see a red light at a dark intersection.
The man did not use words.
He growled.
Actually growled.
Erin backed up a step, seriously wondering if he might try to bite her.
The guy was probably schizo, the way he acted. Yet he was using the phone just like a normal person would. A mix of sane and insane, right in keeping with this madness about Kyle.
The guy started yelling into the phone. What Erin could pick up between the four-letter words was something about rent, getting kicked out, and threats to remove body parts.
Now Erin didn’t know which she feared most—the phone call to come, or an explosion by this crazy man who might want to take out his ire on her.
She ducked into the market.
And was immediately greeted by Julietta, one of the checkers.
“Early today,” Julietta said. She was a stocky woman who was always polite and friendly. Erin often contrasted her with the checkers at the bigger market down the street, who didn’t seem to care all that much about customer relations.
“Waiting to use the phone,” Erin said, nodding her head toward the doors.
“The pay phone?”
Erin nodded.
“You want to use mine?” Julietta said, reaching into her pocket.
“No,” Erin said. “I’m expecting somebody to call me.”
“Out there?”
“It’s a game,” Erin said. She’d already revealed too much.
“Like a scavenger hunt?”
“Something like that,” Erin said.
“Somebody else on the phone?” Julietta asked.
“Right now, yes.”
Julietta took a step to the left so she could look out the front doors. “Oh, that guy.”
“You know him?”
Julietta nodded. “Been around here all morning. Comes in the store, goes out. I know he’s scared some people.”
“Can’t you call the police?”
“I did. They said they’d send a car by, but so far, nothing.”
Surely, Erin thought, the man would know that a busy signal meant someone else was on the phone. He wouldn’t hold it against her.
Right?
Not right. None of this was right. Erin looked down at the rack of impulse-buy items by one of the cash registers. Next to it was a display of tabloids. On one of them appeared unflattering head shots of two Hollywood stars, a former couple now involved in a nasty divorce, with the screaming headline “I will destroy you!”
And she suddenly felt the urge to tear that tabloid to shreds, and every copy of it, and make a pile of the papers and set fire to it, as if in some ancient ritual that would purge all the ugliness in the world, or if not the world at least the immediate area surrounding B&B Market.
Through the glass she could see the wild man.
He turned his head and looked directly at her.
And screamed.
45
“She connected with me on a dating site,” Dylan said.
Sam Wyant loosened his tie as he sat back, listening.
“I looked at her profile. On the part that talked about sense of humor, she mentioned that she had grown up loving Saturday Night Live, especially Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo. Well, me too. So I suggested we get together for lunch. Which we did, and I really liked her. We talked on the phone a couple of times after that, and then I asked her to have dinner. So we met at Clearman’s, in Pico Rivera, and we were having a great time. Or so I thought. Then after the meal, we were finishing up and she drops this bomb on me.”
“Bomb?”
“I have to back up a little. A lot’s been happening. The other night I got a note slipped under my door. It was in an envelope and it was written in crayon. It said, Your son is alive. My son was kidnapped fifteen years ago. He was never found.”
Sam Wyant scribbled something on his legal pad.
“I thought it had to be some sick guy playing a trick on me, and then I got a second note. Same crayon, and this one said that Kyle’s favorite play thing as a kid was the Harry Potter Lego set. And that’s true. So then after our nice dinner, so to speak, Tabitha looked at me and said if I wanted to see my son again I was to do exactly as she said.”
“Wait.” Sam Wyant wrote faster. Then put his pen down and folded his hands. “Extortion?”
“She didn’t tell me what I had to do.”
“She didn’t bring up the subject of money?”
“No. She had some fantasy about her and me and Kyle being happy together, but I didn’t believe … I didn’t let myself believe Kyle was alive. She said she had proof. A photo. That I was to come to her house to see it. I had to see it.”
“You didn’t report this to the police?”
“She had it all set up, didn’t she?” Dylan said. “She could deny everything. Make me look like the crazy one.”
“So you think this woman was in league with someone?”
“Yes,” Dylan said. “He has contacted my ex-wife.”
“Where does she live, your ex?”
“Here in the Valley.”
“I’ll want to talk to her.” Wyant wrote something, then underlined it twice. Then looked back at Dylan. “You said the victim contacted you through this dating site.”
“Right.”
“You didn’t make the initial contact?”
“No.”
“You didn’t know her?”
“No.”
“Yet she expressed this desire to be with you and your son?”
“That’s what she dropped on me, yeah.”
“Do you think she was serious about that?”
Dylan hesitated. He went back over Tabitha’s demeanor, hearing her voice. How steady it was. How perfectly modulated. And realized he couldn’t tell a thing by it.
“I have no idea,” Dylan said.
“Because if she was,” Wyant said, “she had to be someone from your past. This elaborate entrapment would require a fixation that borders on insanity. Her claim to have your son, or access to your s
on, could have been a mere device to manipulate you into further action. She would have to be an expert on your life somehow.”
Sam Wyant tapped the legal pad a couple of times with the point of his pen.
“Now,” Wyant said, “the guy who hit you.”
“He said his name was Carbona. The detective who interviewed me, Smith, says he is ex-LAPD. Supposedly with a good record.”
“We’ll get his records,” Wyant said as he wrote.
“He’s lying,” Dylan said.
“Then I’ll shred him like yesterday’s newspaper. Speaking of which, let me do the talking to reporters.”
“Reporters?”
“Of course. Or what used to be called reporters. Real journalism is as rare as the blue-footed booby.”
Sam Wyant picked up the legal pad and put it in his briefcase. He slipped the pen into its holder in the case, then shut and latched it.
“I will represent you, Dylan. But I will need fifty-thousand to get started. If there’s a trial, it could reach two to three hundred grand.”
Dylan lost breath.
“I know,” Wyant said. “I wish it were not so. Believe it or not, I’m giving you a break on my normal fee. If there’s a problem with that, I’ll be happy to find you an—”
“Can I get a loan on my house?”
“It’s done all the time,” Wyant said.
“I want you to do this,” Dylan said.
“Then I will.”
“What about bail?” Dylan said. “Can I get out of here?”
“We’ll set a bail hearing right away,” Wyant said. “It’ll be something substantial.”
“How substantial?”
“With your profile, it won’t be seven figures—”
“Seven figures!”
“Won’t be,” Wyant said. “I’ll try to get it to five, but most likely it will be six.”
“Can I post a bond?”
“Of course.”
“What is it, ten percent?”
“Normally. But I do business with a solid bondsman, and if I refer he only charges eight percent.”
Dylan rested his forehead on the palm of his right hand. The hand was giving off heat like never before.
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