by Tyler Dilts
Wells’s nostrils flared, and the corners of his mouth turned down. “Just what are you implying, Detective?” Apparently he didn’t like being called Trev.
“I’m implying that I’d like an answer to the question we actually asked.” I stared directly into Daryl’s dull brown eyes. He held my gaze for a moment and then looked away, his face a bit paler than it had been.
“That’s enough.” Wells adjusted his tie and stood up, moving forward and slightly to his right so we’d have to look around him to see Daryl. “This interview is over.” He stepped around the table and, with a sweep of his hand, showed us the hall by which we’d entered. “Shall I show you out?”
“I think we can remember the way,” I said. “Thanks just the same.”
Jen turned back to Daryl and said, “Thank you for your time, Mr. Waxler. I know this is very difficult for you.”
When he looked up at her, he looked like he might cry. He opened his mouth as if he were about to speak, but changed his mind and just nodded. His hair fell into his eyes again, but this time, he left it alone.
In the garage, Max held the heavy bag for D.J., who was practicing a side kick. The faint odor of sweat hung in the air. They grinned at Jen and adjusted their posture as we came in. “Let’s see another one of those,” she said. D.J. focused his attention on the bag and gave it his best shot, which wasn’t very impressive.
“Kick through the target. The follow-through will give you more power.” Both boys looked confused.
“Imagine,” she said, as they locked their eyes on her, “that you’re really kicking a target six inches behind the target you want to strike.” They both pretended to understand what she was saying.
“Like this,” she said. “D.J., hold the bag for me, okay?” He rushed behind the bag and leaned into it with his shoulder.
“Ready?” Jen asked.
“Ready,” he said.
Faster than their eyes could follow, she cocked her left knee toward her chest, leaned to her right, and shot her left foot into the bag like a piston. The sound of her foot impacting the bag was simultaneous with that of the air bursting out of D.J.’s abdomen. He took a step back and leaned his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath.
“See what I mean?” Jen asked.
Max seemed as surprised as D.J., and they both just nodded and stared at her as she turned and walked back down the driveway. Neither of them paid me any attention at all as I followed her and tried not to laugh.
D.J. caught up with us about halfway to the car. He was still trying to catch his breath. “That,” he said, “was really good.”
“Thanks,” Jen said. “Just takes lots and lots of practice.”
“No, I mean it. My teacher,” he paused to suck in another breath, “he can’t even kick that hard.”
“I’m sure he can. He’s just going easy on you like he’s supposed to. Now get back to work.” She tried to smile, but I could see that it didn’t come easy.
She was silent and gripping the steering wheel too tightly as we drove through the gate and started down the hill. “What’s the matter?” I asked, assuming she was pissed at me for forcing Wells into a defensive position too soon. “Didn’t like the way I handled the interview?”
“It’s not that. That was fine.”
I watched her drive in silence. “I thought I was supposed to be the brooding one” I said.
She was quiet for another mile.
“Come on,” I said. “What is it? You think you were too tough on D.J.?”
“No. Not that, either. Not hard enough.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Five years ago…” she said, glancing over at me. “Five years ago, I would have bounced his skinny ass off the wall.” As I tried to think of the right thing to say, I realized that I was making a habit out of not knowing how to respond to my partner.
“Well,” Marty asked as we walked into the squad, “did he do it?”
“Oh yeah,” I said, “he confessed, but then he changed his mind, tried to escape. We had to shoot him.”
“Damn, I wish some of those high school punks we had to interview tried to escape. There were a few could have used a bullet.”
It was pushing four o’clock when Ruiz opened his office door and called Dave, Marty, Jen, and me inside. Just as we’d squeezed four chairs into the room and arranged them in a tight circle around the lieutenant’s desk, Pat Glenn slid in against the wall next to the door to join us.
“Maybe we ought to go up to the conference room,” Jen said as she tried to inch her chair toward the window to make a bit more space. Someone in the room needed a shower, but I couldn’t tell who.
“No,” Ruiz said, “I want to know the score before we take it upstairs to the big table. We find out anything today? Marty?”
“Well, the interviews at the school didn’t turn up much. Spent the morning with the other teachers. Most of them really liked her.”
“Most?” I asked.
“Yeah. There were maybe half a dozen who were jealous, maybe held a little grudge, but other than that, she was popular. Nobody with a big enough bug up their ass to have a motive.”
“The students?”
“Crazy about her. She was the one who all the girls wanted to be like and all the boys just wanted.”
“Yeah,” Dave said, “I even had one banger wanted me to tell him who the doer was so he could ‘fuck up his shit.’”
“But nothing solid?” Ruiz asked.
“Not really.” Marty shook his head. “We’re doing background checks, and we’ve still got uniforms taking statements from students, but no, nothing. She was teacher-of-the-year material. They’re broken up.” He closed his eyes a moment and then opened them again. “Nobody there wanted her dead. They’ve even got a little makeshift shrine outside her classroom. Candles and pictures and notes. It’s hitting them hard.”
Ruiz nodded and turned his head. “Jen?”
“Waxler might be a little hinky. Lawyered up before we even got there,” she said. Eight eyebrows went up simultaneously.
“Get anything out of him?” Marty asked.
“Not really,” she said. “He’s insecure, a little mousy. I can maybe see the whole unrequited-love angle. She rejects him, he gets desperate enough…”
“Danny?” Ruiz asked.
“Doesn’t seem the type to get violent,” I said, “but we really didn’t have much of a chance to push his buttons and see what happened. I wouldn’t rule anything out, though.” I turned to Pat. “Did his alibi hold?”
“I checked it out with the hotel’s records. He used a credit card to make the reservation, but paid cash for the room. The hotel manager said that he still would have had to show the card to check in, but he wouldn’t need any other ID.”
“So,” Marty said, “anybody could have checked in under his name.”
“Right.” Pat nodded and tapped the edge of Ruiz’s desk with his palm. “And they wouldn’t even have been committing a crime because they wouldn’t be claiming to be the owner of the card or making any fraudulent charges.”
“Spurned lover with a weak alibi,” Marty said. “You’ve got to look hard at that.”
“I want to take another run at him,” I said. “See if I can get around the lawyer.”
“What about Tropov?” Dave asked.
“Unless we get something hard on Waxler, we don’t close any doors,” Ruiz said. Dave leaned back in his chair, with a satisfied look on his face.
“One other thing,” Marty said. “All the local channels had people out there. It’s going to be all over the news.”
Ruiz grimaced. “I know. Don’t worry about it. Just keep doing what you’re doing and let the brass handle the vultures.”
Marty, Jen, and I gathered around the twelve-inch TV in the coffee room. Each of the local news broadcasts led with the story. They had shots of the school campus, the candles glowing softly among the remembrances outside the classroom, students crying, stu
dents thinking, students talking, teachers doing the same—everything they always show when someone who is in any way associated with a school is murdered. I wondered if any of what we were watching was actually stock footage. It would certainly save the news directors time and energy.
On the screen, a serious-faced young Asian woman with a Latino name and a microphone asked everyone inane questions and then summed up the story with this: “Elizabeth Ann Williams. The latest casualty in the ever-escalating epidemic of school violence. Kandi, back to you.”
Marty reached over and turned off the TV. “Well, at least they’re predictable.” He drained a Styrofoam coffee cup and tossed it across the room into the wastebasket.
“The big question,” Jen said, “is whether this hurts us or helps us.”
“Depends on who’s watching,” I said.
“Right.” Marty got up, went over to the Mr. Coffee, and filled another cup.
“You just threw one of those away,” Jen said.
“I know,” he said. “I thought I was done. I make up for it in other ways.”
“Yeah, right,” she said. “How?”
“Well, you don’t see me driving around in an SUV now, do you?”
Jen looked at me. “Don’t you even think about laughing at that,” she said. I turned my head and looked out the window so she wouldn’t see my face.
It was too early to contemplate another sleepless night, so I drove downtown and parked a block up and over from the house in which we’d busted Tropov. I took a musty-smelling charcoal-colored zip-up hooded sweatshirt and a black baseball cap out of the trunk and put them on. There was a chill in the night air, but no wind, so it didn’t feel as cold as it might have.
A pit bull snarled at me from a backyard and set off a chain reaction of barking dogs, which worked its way up the street and faded off into the distance. I walked around the corner and up the block on the side of the street opposite the house, thinking about how close I had come to killing the Russian. Would I have done it if Jen hadn’t stopped me? I want to say no, that I would have composed myself, that I would have held it together, that I would have done the right thing. But Jen knows me. She read me better than I read myself.
If Tropov were still occupying the house, there was little evidence. No lights. No sound. No movement. No car in front. No signs of life. Only the weeds. They seemed taller than they had the last time I’d been there. Probably just my imagination, though. Dead weeds don’t grow.
From the darkened front room of a house across the street and two doors up from Tropov’s, someone watched me pass. The curtains moved as I walked by. The window was closed, and even if it had not been, there was very little wind. I wondered who might be inside. Cops? It was the perfect location for a stakeout. I was curious enough to turn right at the corner and right again into the alley behind the row of houses I’d just passed.
In the driveway behind the home in which I’d seen the curtain move, there sat a pale silver metallic Ford Crown Victoria. The bargain Maaco paint job didn’t fool me, though, nor would it fool the average urban ten-year-old. Even if the black-steel wheels weren’t enough of a tip-off, you didn’t see many citizens tooling around in the big Fords, at least not in Long Beach. I lifted the lid off the garbage can and saw several days worth of fast-food bags and take-out coffee cups and very little else. They might as well have parked a black-and-white on the front lawn.
I turned around and went back the way I came. In front of the window with the moving curtain, I turned, flashed my best shit-eating grin, and gave a double-fisted thumbs-up to the cops watching from inside.
On the way home I made one more stop. I pulled my Camry up to the curb in front of Beth’s driveway. I got out and walked slowly past the front house on the lot. When I could see her front door, I stopped and studied the small house she had lived in.
Had Daryl ever seen it? Had he been here? I should have asked him before I pissed off his lawyer. I tried to imagine myself in his position—if that front door had been closed in my face, I wondered, would it make me angry? Daryl didn’t seem the angry type, but I could see him desperate, and that can be even worse. How attached had he been? How much had it hurt him to hear her say she wasn’t interested? Was that pain, that desperation, enough? It would have had to push him to the edge, even a bit over it, for him to go so far in the commission of the crime. Would he have been able to make it back? I pictured Daryl in Beth’s classroom, kneeling over her body, brown hair hanging over his eyes, raising the blade again and again. It didn’t work for me. The story just didn’t play right.
I walked onto the porch and checked the crime scene tape. It had lost most of its adhesion, as if perhaps someone had pulled it loose and tried to replace it. I ran through the list of people who might have been inside since we’d last been here. Daryl? Tropov? The colonel?
“Hello, Detective,” said a voice behind me.
I spun and saw Harlan Gibbs loping toward the porch. “Hope I didn’t startle you.”
“Me? Hell no, I’m tough as nails.”
He was wearing old Levi’s and an untucked blue-plaid shirt with snaps. The walnut grips of his revolver protruded from his waistband. He noticed me noticing it. “I saw you walking up the drive. Didn’t recognize you from behind.”
“You haven’t seen anybody nosing around here, have you, Mr. Gibbs?”
“No, not since all the crime scene people and news people left on Saturday morning. Why?”
“Tape on the door’s a bit loose. Wondered if you might have seen something.”
“Nope, not a thing,” he said. But he’d been watching. Didn’t take him even five minutes to make me.
FIFTEEN
As the first swallow of vodka and orange juice slid down my throat, it felt like a warm patch of sunlight on a spring day. The next two went down the same way. After refilling the glass, I went into the living room and turned on the TV. I thumbed all the way through the channels twice before settling on an old episode of This Old House on TLC. Kevin and Norm were performing a cost-benefit analysis of natural oak kitchen cabinetry. Kevin wondered about the cost savings of veneers, but Norm, the voice of reason and experience, convinced him of the long-term efficacy of solid hardwood.
After the show ended, I flipped through my bootleg copy of the murder book, trying to find an angle I’d missed before. If it was there, I couldn’t spot it.
I stared at the ceiling and thought about our suspects, such as they were. We had nothing hard on either Waxler or Tropov. We barely had anything soft. If their alibis came anywhere near holding up, we’d be right back where we began.
Even with an alibi, I couldn’t get past Tropov’s cockiness. The smirk on his face when Marty asked where he’d been at the time of the murder was too much. He knew he had nothing to worry about, but he knew he was connected, too. Maybe I dismissed him too quickly. We knew he was capable of the savagery. That was more than we could say for Waxler. Still, if you’re going with the odds, spurned lover is a hell of a lot more likely than crazed Russian mobster.
I couldn’t honestly say I liked either one of them, but what else did we have? Harlan Gibbs? Not likely. Until someone better came skipping along, we were stuck. But what worried me most was the pressure—high-profile case, media coverage, task force, ambitious police chief and DA. It wouldn’t be long before the brass would be pressing for an arrest—and they wouldn’t particularly care if it was the right one, as long as it stuck.
My head began to hurt. I took a hot shower, got dressed, and decided to walk the mile and a quarter to Second Street to meet Geoff Hatcher at the Shorehouse.
The walk made me about ten minutes late, but it helped clear the confusion out of my head. It didn’t replace it with anything, though. It just left me with a vaguely pleasant emptiness.
The stretch of Second Street that runs through Belmont Shore is where most of the locals spend their leisure time. It’s a one-stop eating and shopping area for the neighborhood’s upper and upper-upper
middle class. I walked past half a dozen university hang-out bars, Rubio’s Fish Tacos, Banana Republic, Gaps of both the standard and baby variety, and Starbucks before stopping at a newspaper machine outside the Rite Aid to pick up a Press-Telegram. I went by a second Starbucks, part of a vicious, corporate, flanking maneuver in the ongoing coffeehouse turf war, with the big Satan, Starbucks, and the little Satan, Coffee Bean, wantonly slaughtering the neighborhood’s independent mom-and-pop caffeine pushers. As I walked, I read the paper. The story about Beth had made the front page below the fold. A sentence in the first paragraph linked the crime to “the growing incidence of violence in our public schools.”
When I walked into the Shorehouse Cafe, Hatcher was already waiting at a table by the window overlooking the street. “Daniel,” he said, standing up. “How are you?”
“Fuck you.” I slapped the paper down on the table. He flinched as if I’d thrown a glass of water in his face. “One simple request—was it too much for you?”
Hatcher couldn’t seem to stop blinking. I sat down across the table from him. He took the newspaper in his hands and scanned the text until he found the article. “I didn’t write it like that. It was an editorial deci—”
“That’s your byline isn’t it?”
“Yes, but—”
“Is it or isn’t it?”
“It is.”
We sat there in silence.
“Now what?” he said.
“Now you apologize, and I pretend like I’m not pissed off.”
“I’m sorry.”
“All right. What the hell were they thinking?”
“Everyone’s making that connection. It’s violence. It’s in school. Of course it’s related.”
“Who’s everyone, Geoff? Channel Two? Channel Seven? Nine? Four? Who? It wasn’t in the Times, and I know damn well no one in the department or the mayor’s office gave you that shit. I thought you had a little integrity. Why else would I be here? I might as well be sitting down with Connie Chung.”
“Are you done yet?” he asked.
“Yeah, I guess I am.”
“Would you like something to eat?”