Come Twilight (Long Beach Homicide Book 4)

by Tyler Dilts

  “That was nice of you.”

  “Nice? What’s wrong with you?” He sucked his teeth and I half expected him to spit at my feet. “What do you think would have happened to rental rates in this building when the paint job on that one started flaking and peeling and looking shitty six months after it was done? People won’t pay top dollar to live next to a dump.”

  “What did he do after you told him?”

  “Asked my advice. Set him up with a solid guy. You need any painting done?”

  “No, I rent, so my landlord handles that. I’m lucky. He’s a good guy. Knows what he’s doing.”

  “A good guy. That’s important. Those goddamned management companies? They don’t care. Do shoddy work, rip off their tenants. It’s not just some business. People live here.”

  I picked up the thread. “It’s their home,” I said.

  “See, Bill knew that. Right from the beginning. I never had to teach him that.” His jaw clenched, as if he was biting down on something, trying to hold it back. He exhaled through his nose and checked his watch. Then he bent over, picked up the sprayer, and started around the corner.

  “Mr. Acker?” I said.

  He looked over his shoulder and said, “Come on, then, I ain’t got all morning.”

  His building wasn’t as old or as charming as Bill’s, but it was clean and seemed well maintained. His one-bedroom was furnished in a utilitarian fashion, and I had no doubt there was a place for everything and everything was damn well in it. In the nook off of his kitchen, we sat at a new-looking Formica-topped table that was probably older than me. He poured two cups of black coffee and handed one to me. If there were any cream and sugar in the house, he must have been saving it for the pussies. I pretended to like the coffee.

  He told me about Bill. How much Acker had helped him in those first years. How they’d become friends, even though Bill was too nice for his own good, letting himself be taken advantage of all the time. “By tenants, mostly,” he said. “But a few years ago, when Lucy married that jerk-off, then by him. Bill had loaned him money to start a restaurant.” Acker didn’t know exactly how much, but he thought low six figures. “It was one of those gastropubs or something. First, it was supposed to be downtown, but that didn’t work out, so then he set sights on Retro Row. Struck out with that one too, though, and wound up in Bixby Knolls. Found a place he liked, some vacant shop, and started renovating. It was almost all ready to go, had the furniture in, all the decorations up, appliances in the kitchen, staff hired. Then something went south. I never knew what. They delayed the opening. Bill sunk even more into it. They finally got it up and running and the damn place folded after two months.”

  We talked for a few more minutes. He offered more coffee and I declined. When it was clear Acker didn’t have anything else of value, I thanked him and excused myself.

  Upstairs in Kobe’s studio, Jen said, “You and Old Hickory must have really hit it off.”

  “Got some more background on Denkins,” I said.

  “Anything useful?”

  “Maybe. How’d you do up here?”

  Ethan came out of the bathroom. “Found a ton of prints,” he said. “And I think we’ve got some solid DNA samples, too.” He looked pleased.

  Jen led me into the kitchen. “We also found this.” She opened a small manila envelope and tipped it onto the tiled countertop. A yellow three-by-three Post-it note slid out. There were two perpendicular crease marks in the paper. It looked like it had been folded into a tiny square. “It was tucked into the coin pocket of those jeans in the closet.”

  I flipped it over with my fingernail and saw three names—S. Wise, C. Shepard, and B. Darklighter—written in tiny, neat handwriting. Each was followed by a different phone number.

  “Those names mean anything to you?” she asked, putting the flap of the envelope down on the tile like a dustpan and sliding the note back inside.

  “No. But I’ll bet they mean something to Kobe.”

  “Take a right up here,” I said to Jen on the way back to the station.

  “Why?” She checked the rearview mirror.

  There was an Accord that had been behind us for the last mile and a half.

  “The white Honda?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s been two cars back since we turned onto Broadway.”

  She cast a doubtful glance at me, but didn’t say anything else until she’d made the turn.

  I watched over my shoulder. The Accord didn’t follow. I kept looking on the off chance it might have been a two-car tail. No one else turned behind us.

  “Around the block?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  She looped around onto Vista, then took Euclid back to Broadway. “What was his name again? The guy from the building next door?”

  “Kurt Acker.”

  “Get anything from him?

  I told Jen the story and she asked, “So when was that? The loan Denkins gave to the son-in-law?”

  “Two years ago, I think. There was a record of the loan in the files, but nothing specific about the restaurant.”

  We stopped at a red light and she looked at me. “When are you planning to re-interview the daughter?”

  “I don’t know yet. Looks like there’s a lot more I need to find out before I do.”

  I wasn’t anxious to repeat my Kobayashi Maru mistake, but Patrick came into the squad room before I had a chance to Google the names from the Post-it. I called him over to my desk. “Any of these names mean anything to you?”

  “What names?”

  “S. Wise?”

  He shook his head. “Nope.”

  “How about C. Shepard?”

  “Not that one, either. They all have initials?” he asked. “What are these? Where are they from?”

  “A note we found in Kobe’s apartment. Just have one more.”

  “Shoot.”

  “B. Darklighter?”

  A broad grin spread across his face. “These guys really are nerds, aren’t they?”

  “Why?” I asked. “Where’s the last one from?”

  “Star Wars. The ‘B’ stands for Biggs.”

  “Biggs Darklighter? I don’t remember that name from Star Wars. Who is he?”

  “Barely shows up in Episode IV. He’s Luke’s friend from Tatooine. Supposedly there was a whole subplot, but it wound up getting cut.”

  “And that’s just bouncing around in your head?”

  “What were those other two names again?”

  “C. Shepard?”

  “Wait. Mass Effect? Commander Shepard?”

  “Are you asking me? That’s a video game, right?”

  “What was the first one again? S. Wise?”

  Something clicked. “Wait,” I said. “Lord of the Rings?”

  He nodded. “Samwise Gamgee.”

  I thought about it. There had to be some significance to the selection of names. If Kobayashi Maru was an alias, it stood to reason that these were, too.

  Patrick wrote the full names down on a notepad. Then, underneath each one, he wrote them with just the first initial, as they had been on the Post-it note. He studied them intently.

  “See something?” I asked.

  “They’re inconsistent,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Samwise is one word, just his first name. Why break it up into two? And it looks like they used the initials so the names wouldn’t be too obvious. S. Wise and C. Shepard seem really generic, right? So with those two, you wouldn’t even get the reference. If Kobe’s name was on here, too? K. Maru, even that one would fit. But Darklighter’s a dead giveaway. Without that one, I wouldn’t have seen the pattern.”

  As I thought about it, I had something of an epiphany. Because Patrick owned a couple of fedoras and had once used the word “artisanal” in conversation without the requisite tone of mockery, for years we’d been teasing him about being a hipster, when, in fact, we should have been giving him shit that whole time for bein
g a nerd.

  Fortunately, Bill Denkins had saved passwords on his laptop, so when I opened his browser history and clicked on Facebook, they autofilled and logged me in. His feed was filled with dozens of condolences. I read each one but nothing in particular stood out. They were standard you’re-in-our-prayers kinds of things. He was in people’s thoughts, and quite a few mentioned his daughter, Lucinda, but many didn’t. There were a few links to articles about depression and suicide prevention. Only a few people knew that he’d been murdered, and my conversation with Kurt Acker, the manager of the adjacent building, suggested that his death had been rumored to be a suicide. I wondered how many of the messages were from current or former tenants. I would read them all again later and check out those who’d left them, but I’d had a different purpose for logging in then—I wanted to see what I could learn about Bill’s daughter and her husband.

  Lucinda didn’t post much herself. Mostly Instagram photos that looked like they were automatically shared on Facebook. There didn’t seem to be any pattern to them, other than that she was fond of flowers and trees and unusual buildings. She had a good eye, too. While the subjects were fairly common, there was always something interesting about them. Aside from the pics, though, most of her wall was taken up with the standard cute pictures and funny videos and share-if-you-agree memes.

  Joseph Polson, on the other hand, was a lot more active. He apparently never ate a meal he didn’t photograph or read an article he didn’t share. Lots of reviews of things—restaurants and movies and TV and music. He was also big on the Onion and ClickHole, and was experiencing a good deal of anticipatory anxiety over the new season of The Walking Dead. I had to scroll back a long way to find what I was really looking for—the restaurant he’d opened at the end of last year.

  It had been called Winter. The place looked like a thousand others I’d seen online and in person, all communal tables and brushed-aluminum chairs and rough-finished wood. There didn’t really seem to be any theme or anything, other than a heavy this-looks-really-right-now-doesn’t-it vibe that, at least in the images he put on his feed, didn’t seem to be doing its job very well. I searched for it on Yelp and found only a few reviews. Three or four raves that seemed like they were probably written by friends or family, and a dozen more by underwhelmed customers. The consensus was that the service was slow and spotty and the food ranged from mediocre to adequate. Most gave it two or three stars. One commenter wrote, “The road to dinner hell is paved with good intentions.” I started feeling bad for Joe. Winter had, either appropriately or ironically, closed in March.

  I was keeping track of what I was reading on a yellow pad, making notes about what I knew about Lucinda and Joe. How much support had Bill given them beyond the loan? How much did she make? How hard had Winter’s failure impacted their finances? How much money, in addition to the loan from Bill, had been sunk into the restaurant, and where had it come from? They all led up to one central question—could any of this have given Joe a strong-enough motive to kill his father-in-law?

  No one was in the squad room in the early afternoon when I decided it was time for lunch. Before I’d met Julia, and before someone was trying to kill me, I spent a lot of time alone. Having a meal or going to the movies by myself had never been a big deal to me. I never thought too much about it. A certain degree of introversion has always felt right to me, and, honestly, I liked it that way. It suited me. It was comfortable. But in the last few days I’d had pretty much constant company, as per Ruiz’s dictate. There had been so much on my mind with both cases that I hadn’t really had a chance to be bothered by the lack of time to myself. The lieutenant had been smart. I was used to spending a lot of time with Jen. When one of us caught a case, it wasn’t at all unusual to spend most of our waking hours together for days at a stretch. If he had assigned the babysitting duty to anyone else, even Patrick or Marty or Dave, I’d be bristling and looking for escape opportunities every chance I got.

  I decided to eat at The Potholder Too, the second location of one of Long Beach’s most popular breakfast mainstays. It was only a block away from the station, and an omelet for lunch always seemed like a good idea to me. The more I thought about it, the hungrier I got. And the better I felt about having the chance to be by myself for a while.

  The walk was a short one. Out the back into the parking lot, around the building, right on Broadway, and just down the block. Door to door in less than five minutes. How many times had I done it? Fifty? Seventy-five?

  As soon as I got outside and felt the sun on my face, the pang in my stomach that I’d attributed to my hunger grew deeper. My sense of situational awareness intensified as I scanned the lot. I watched the uniforms and the suits coming and going. Most of the faces were familiar. I scrutinized the ones that weren’t, assessing potential threats, one by one.

  I’d dealt with threats to my life many times. I had no idea why, but now for some reason I was feeling a kind of vulnerability I never had before.

  “Hey, Danny,” a voice said to my right.

  I turned too quickly.

  “You okay?” It was Stan Burke, a patrol vet who I’d known for years. He’d been one of my field-training officers when I was a rookie.

  “I’m sorry, what?” I said.

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  He didn’t look like he believed me. “I heard about what happened. Hell of a thing.”

  I nodded. “That it is.” I noticed I was breathing. “Just heading out for lunch.”

  “Where you going?”

  “Potholder.”

  “Want some company?” he asked.

  To my embarrassment, I did.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CADILLAC RANCH

  “I thought there would be more blood.” Lucinda sounded far away when she called. We’d released the crime scene so she could begin to sort through her father’s things.

  “Sometimes there’s not that much,” I said, remembering her father’s slumped-over body. A few drops had found their way onto the sofa. I wondered if she’d looked closely enough to see them.

  “I’m calling because of the funeral,” she said.

  “How can I help?”

  “I was wondering about his computer and his phone?”

  “What about them?” I asked. We’d be able to get them back to her eventually, but it would likely not be for quite a while.

  “The contact lists? He knew a lot of people, a lot of tenants, I don’t know who they all are.”

  “We need to hang on to his things for now, but I can get you copies of the lists.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “That would be a big help.” There was a tired sadness in her voice. She seemed to be genuinely grieving, but I couldn’t help but question whether figuring out who to invite to the service was the only reason she wanted his devices. They also held a lot of other information about his finances and would be useful to her if she’d been involved in his death and was trying to stay ahead of our investigation. I was betting she didn’t know how much information we’d taken from both his hard and electronic files. The more she was in the dark in regard to that, the better off we were.

  “He also had an address book. I’ll copy that for you too, okay?”

  “Brown leather with his initials on the cover?”

  “That’s the one.”

  She tried to say something, but her voice broke into a sob. While she cried I listened. I like to think I’m a good judge of people’s tears. It comes with the job. Even over the phone, hers struck me as genuine.

  When she was able to compose herself enough to speak, she said, “I gave that to him for his fiftieth birthday. He loved it.”

  “I’m sure he did,” I said. “It’s a really beautiful piece of craftsmanship.” I thought about the book. It was nice, but I couldn’t imagine I’d call it beautiful under other circumstances.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  I told her I’d drop the co
pies off as soon as I could and ended the call.

  It was far too early to draw any conclusions, but I began to wonder how close she was to her husband.

  “Jesus,” Dave said across the squad room. He and Marty were huddled behind Patrick’s desk, staring over his shoulders at something on the screen of his iPad.

  “What are you guys looking at?”

  Dave glanced at Patrick, who nodded.

  “You should come over here,” Dave said.

  “What is it?”

  “It was your car,” Marty said.

  They made room for me behind Patrick. Before I got a good look at the image on the screen, Patrick started side-scrolling through photographs. “You should start with this one,” he said.

  I looked down at the screen and saw a straight-on side view of my Camry. The front and rear ends were both relatively intact, but the same couldn’t be said for the middle. Where the driver’s door should have been was a gaping hole. It looked like a giant shark had opened its jaws wide and taken a huge bite. The driver’s seat was completely gone, as were the steering wheel, much of the dashboard, and a significant portion of the roof. What remained was a jagged mess of metal and plastic, upholstery and fabric, all twisted and blackened by the explosion. Part of the passenger’s seat was pressed against the door on the other side, and all the windows had blown out. What remained of the roof bulged upward like the top of a botulism-tainted can.

  It suddenly became difficult to think of anything other than what would have happened if I’d been inside when the bomb exploded. There wouldn’t have been much of me left. My shoulder and arm tightened and I leaned into the pain.

  “You would have been even deader than we thought,” Dave said.

  Marty clapped me on the back. “Bet no one’s ever been so grateful for a bad spark plug.”

  “ATF confirmed that it was a South African land mine.” Patrick checked his notes. “A Mini MS-803. It’s like a smaller version of the claymore.”

  I was still looking at the photograph. “That’s the small one?”