A King of Infinite Space

by Tyler Dilts

  “Well,” I said, washing my hands, “I’m sure you’ll miss him. I know how close you two were.”

  He blinked hard at me. Three times. My bet was that he didn’t know whether to follow up with his intended attack or to respond to my insinuation. He went with option one. “Somebody planted an article in the Press-Telegram.”

  “Now who would do a thing like that?”

  “You know what the Russians do when somebody gets attention like that? Do you?” He waited for me to answer. I reached past him for a paper towel instead.

  “They kill them,” he said. He stuck his chin out as if to emphasize his point. “That’s right. They kill them.” He crossed his arms and shot beams of superciliousness at me out of his tiny eyeballs.

  “What was your case again?” I asked. “Some kind of check-kiting thing?”

  “Money laundering.”

  “Oh, well.” I nodded. “Money laundering. That’s some big time stuff, there. Boy. You know what Tropov did to that woman in Seattle, don’t you?”

  This time I waited for him. He kept his mouth puckered shut, so I went on, moving closer to him as I spoke. “The way he chopped her up? Cut out her womb, just to teach her husband a lesson? You know about that, right? Because I can show you the pictures. I’ve got them right back in the squad. You want to see them? You want to?”

  “I know what he did.”

  “You do? Good. Then you’ll understand why I’m not too broken up over the fact that you didn’t get to lock him up in Chino for fifteen months on that class-three felony bullshit. Maybe, and I like to think this is true, maybe we’re all just a little bit better off with that piece of shit scraping the bottom of the harbor.”

  He seemed to find something of great interest in his shoes.

  “Are we done here, or should I do like they used to do in junior high and stick your head in the toilet and give it a good flush?”

  Sometimes nothing goes down quite so easy as a great big juicy chunk of righteous indignation.

  Back in the squad, sitting across the desk from Jen, I was peeling a cold, leftover, pepperoni-and-sausage slice from a large Papa John’s pizza when the call came in.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Jen picked up the phone. “Homicide,” she said, “this is Tanaka.” The chair squeaked and her shoulders tensed as she sat up and leaned over the yellow writing pad on the desk. She began scribbling notes with a tooth-scarred pencil, tapping on the desk to get my attention.

  I stopped chewing.

  Jen spoke into the phone in monosyllables. “When? Where? Who’s there?” She nodded, scrawled a few lines, and hung up.

  “What?” I asked.

  She was on her feet and holstering her pistol before I finished swallowing. “The case isn’t closed anymore.”

  Jen drove. Ruiz and Marty were already en route to the scene, a residence in the Bixby Knolls area. She pulled into the northbound traffic on the 710 Freeway. In front of us, the brake lights on a tractor-trailer flashed, and my grip tightened on the passenger grab handle. Jen slowed.

  “Could you give us a little more space there?” I gestured toward the truck ahead of us.

  She cocked her head. It was the first time I had ever made a comment on her driving. That’s why she was always the one behind the wheel. I had a much higher tolerance for her driving habits than she had for mine.

  “What are you—” She stopped herself before she finished the thought. I assumed she remembered then how Megan had died. We rode in silence for a few minutes.

  What I said then surprised me as much as it confused Jen. “Megan was pregnant.”

  Without looking, I could feel Jen fighting the urge to look at me, to keep her eyes on the highway. I stared straight ahead at the back end of the semitruck. Red block letters on the bottom edge of the passenger side swing-out door read, “Drivers Wanted! Great Pay! Great Benefits! Call 1-888-U-DRIVE-2.”

  I wasn’t sorry I’d said what I had, but I didn’t particularly want to continue, either. The air in the Explorer, though, felt thicker, and Jen felt farther away. I knew I couldn’t let that one hang any longer. “That’s why she was on her way out of town. She was going to her mother’s. She didn’t know what she wanted to do…thought that maybe she should…” I sucked air in through my nose. “That maybe she should do something about it. I didn’t even know.”

  Jen said something I couldn’t quite hear. Two syllables.

  “That’s how far I’d let her slip away. She wasn’t even sure if she still wanted to have my child. She had to leave to figure that out.”

  “That’s not your fault, Danny.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  She didn’t argue. She just merged onto the Atlantic Avenue off-ramp. I hadn’t even noticed the transition to the San Diego Freeway. I was trying to see my reflection in the passenger window when I felt her hand on my knee. “Are you up for this?” she asked.

  The ghostly outline of my head moved up and down on the glass, my face a transparent blur, and I was grateful that neither of us could see the tears welling in the corners of my eyes.

  Bixby Knolls is the best-kept secret of Long Beach’s old money crowd. It’s a neighborhood of multimillion-dollar homes that surround an exclusive country club in the northwest corner of the city, an area not much more than a bullet’s flight from the city of Compton and the parts of the LBC that have given birth to the hardest of the West Coast rappers. Beyond the locals, few knew about the Knolls—and all the rich folks who lived there liked it that way.

  The murder victim we were rolling on had been found in a home on the border of Bixby Knolls and California Heights, one of the neighborhoods that insulated it from the rest of the world. The dividing line between the two communities is a fuzzy one, occurring somewhere between the thought that “someday, if things went well and you had a few lucky breaks and you married someone with an income a bit better than yours you just might live someplace like this” and “Jesus Christ, that place must cost more than my entire family will make if we all live to be a hundred fucking years old.” Mary Ellen Robbins lived just south of that line.

  Her house was a well-kept four-bedroom on a three--quarter-acre lot with an impressively sized pool and an equally impressive landscaped backyard that made room for a variety of ornamental flora, a bit of outdoor statuary, and even some homegrown tomatoes and strawberries. It was all, of course, very elegant and chic. The only thing that detracted from the suburban-posh scene was the wide swath of Mary Ellen’s blood, splattered on the inside of the wide, glass expanse of the sliding patio door. Each time the crime scene photographer’s flash went off, the blood gleamed a bright, translucent purple-pink and then faded to opaque crimson. There was something vaguely psychedelic about the effect.

  Inside, the room itself was done up in off-whites and neutrals, and the lead crime scene tech was all wound up about how much data he was going to be able to get from the splatter patterns. Other than him and the photographer, the only person in the room was Ruiz, who stood in a far corner and looked down at the body, his hands in his pockets. Mary Ellen had been alone for a while, and she’d ripened—from the thickness of the earthy odor seeping out onto the patio, I guessed somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen hours.

  Marty stood outside with Jen and me. “Well,” he said, peering through the glass at the body, “I guess it’s safe to assume the case is open again.” There was no irony in his voice, only a deep weariness that oozed out of him and made me want to rest my eyes, just for a minute. But Marty kept his own eyes open and glued on Mary Ellen’s body.

  Even from outside, it was clear that this murder was the work of the same perpetrator who had killed Beth. Mary Ellen lay on her back, eyes open, her face turned toward the motionless white ceiling fan, her abdomen a bloody pulp of hack-and-slash wounds. The purple-black puddle of her blood had soaked into the tufts of the white Berber carpet, coagulating to a dull sheen. The stump of her handless left arm pointed to a whitewashed bookcase built into the back w
all.

  Ruiz walked around the perimeter of the room and came out onto the patio. He nodded at Jen and me and then turned to Marty. “Where’s your partner?”

  “Went straight to the squad,” Marty said. “Who found her?”

  “Neighbor’s dog was going nuts,” the lieutenant said. “Neighbor came outside, looked over the wall, saw the open patio door, and when she couldn’t get ahold of the vic, she phoned it in.”

  “The door was open?” I asked.

  Ruiz nodded.

  “How do we play it?” Jen asked.

  He didn’t answer for a moment. When he finally spoke, he sounded as if he’d been up for days, his voice like a rasp on wood. “Marty, I want you to get to work on the neighborhood.” He tilted his head toward a huddle of uniforms on the other side of the pool. “Take Stan and a couple of the others with you.”

  “How long has she been down?” Marty asked.

  “More than twelve, less than twenty-four,” Ruiz answered. “They’re working on the lividity. She’s lost so much blood, it’s hard to say.”

  Marty nodded.

  “Jen, Danny, get on the victimology. Find me a connection,” Ruiz said. “I don’t want another scene like this.”

  In the kitchen, Jen and I found Mary Ellen’s embossed, saddle-brown leather purse on the counter. I slipped my hands into a pair of latex gloves and opened the flap.

  Jen said, “That looks like a Kate Spade.”

  “Huh?”

  “The purse. It’s a Kate Spade.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “She’s a designer. A handbag designer.”

  “Expensive?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well,” I said, “I guess it matches everything else.”

  Jen looked around the kitchen as I pulled a wallet out of the handbag. “Why did it take so long to find her?” she asked.

  “It wasn’t that long.”

  “Look around, Danny. She had money. She lived pretty well. She’s dead maybe eighteen hours before someone notices?”

  “Let’s figure it out.”

  She nodded. “I’m going to take a look around.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll catch up with you in a minute.”

  I snapped the wallet’s flap open and found her driver’s license. I hit a speed-dial number on my cell phone and cradled the phone between my shoulder and ear as I flipped through the wallet. Platinum MasterCard. Visa. American Express. Several photos of an older teenage boy. In two of them, he wore a Stanford University sweatshirt.

  “Pat Glenn. Computer Crimes.”

  “Hey, Pat. Hear the news yet?”

  “Danny? No. What news?”

  “Case is open again. You in?”

  “What do you need?”

  “We got another vic. Her name is Mary Ellen Robbins.” I gave Pat her DOB and social.

  “Give me half an hour or so, and I’ll have something for you to work with.”

  “Thanks, Pat.”

  “No sweat.”

  I was still sorting through the business, video rental, and membership cards in the wallet when I heard Jen calling me from the other room. Her voice was far louder than it needed to be. “Danny!” she yelled again as I hurried down a hallway toward the sound of her voice.

  In what looked like a former bedroom that had been converted into a home office, Jen stood behind a large glass-topped desk, her back to the wide window that overlooked the quiet, tree-lined street. She was about to yell again as I came through the door.

  “What is it?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

  “Oh yeah.” She spun a leather-covered address book around and slid it across the desk toward me. “Bottom right-hand side.”

  Finding the connection was easier than we had anticipated. The last entry on the page was the telephone number and home address of Daryl Waxler.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The squad and a handful of uniforms huddled on the concrete by the edge of the pool in the backyard. There was no breeze, and the pungent chemical smell of the overchlorinated water hung in the air. At least it was better than the odor in the house. Stan and his rookie partner stood at the edge of our loose circle. “Greg,” I said, only half-sure I had the right name. “How you doing?”

  “Fine,” he said, the beginnings of a new mustache shadowing his lip.

  Ruiz held up the evidence bag with Mary Ellen’s phone book inside. “Okay. Now we’ve got probable cause for a search. Even an arrest. But before we move, I want to know everything about her connection to Waxler. We need to make this case before anybody else knows about it. Clear?”

  Jen and I nodded.

  Marty asked, “Still want us on the same jobs?”

  “Yeah. Let’s keep it simple.”

  “How about a picture of Waxler to show around?”

  “Jen?” Ruiz asked.

  “Have one back at the squad,” she said. “How many copies?”

  “If we want to keep it quiet,” I said, “the fewer the better.”

  The lieutenant nodded. “Good point. Just one for Marty and one for Stan.”

  “Got it,” she said.

  “What kind of car does he drive?” Marty asked.

  “A black Range Rover or a silver Mercedes E-Class sedan,” I said, thumbing through my notebook to find the license plate numbers. When I found them, I copied them on a blank page, tore out the page, and handed it to Marty.

  “You have his shoe size too?” he asked.

  “Ten wide,” I said.

  “You serious?”

  “Educated guess.”

  Jen made copies of Waxler’s picture while I went upstairs to talk to Pat. “I was just going to call you,” he said as I walked into his darkened office.

  “You were?”

  “Yeah. Big news.”

  “I got some too,” I said.

  “Let me guess—Mary Ellen Robbins knows Daryl Waxler?”

  “Son of a bitch,” I said. “How’d you find that out?”

  “Cell phone records. You?”

  “She’s got him listed in her address book.”

  “Small world, I suppose.”

  “No,” I said, “not that small.”

  “Well, then, this must be evidence.” He handed me a manila file folder.

  “It is. Waxler’s our boy,” I said. I flipped open the folder. Inside were half a dozen pages of information about Mary Ellen. Pat had found the basics—birth, marriage, divorce, tax information, and the like—in about a quarter of the time it would have taken me. “But we need to figure out his connection to her before we go at him. Come up with anything on that yet?”

  “Not yet,” he said, his face glowing white in the glare of the monitor, “but give me an hour or two. If there’s a paper trail, I’ll find it.” I didn’t doubt he would.

  Mary Ellen’s ex-husband, Seth, lived in Manhattan Beach. Technically, her son would be the next of kin, but we decided to notify her ex because the son was in Palo Alto, a freshman at Stanford. A face-to-face notification is usually better for the family than a long-distance phone call—that, and we wanted to needle him for information on her connection to Waxler.

  “Should we call him first?” Jen asked. “Hate to drive all the way out there if he’s not home.”

  “Don’t want to tip him off,” I said.

  “No problem.” She picked up the phone on her desk and dialed a number that she read from her notebook. Someone answered on the other end. “Bob?” she asked. The person on the other end said something. “Oh, I’m sorry. Is Bob there?…Well, who are you? Oh, okay, sorry about that.” She hung up. “He’s home.”

  “Good enough for me.”

  Seth Robbins lived in a brand-spanking-new, trilevel, steel-and-stucco home on Ninth and Highland, less than half a mile from the beach. The building itself, with its wide expanses of glass and the multiple balconies that undoubtedly provided spectacular sunset views, looked as though it might be auditioning for a centerfold spread in Architectural
Digest. Compared to that place, his ex-wife’s house might as well have had a rusting washing machine and a ’72 Impala propped up on concrete blocks on the lawn. Halfway up the white flagstone walkway to the front door, Jen said, “Well, I guess we know who got custody of the money.”

  After we badged him through the crack in the door and told him we needed a few minutes of his time, Robbins let us inside. He was wearing a pair of drawstring shorts and a baggy, green, pigment-dyed T-shirt. He looked too old and too paunchy to have a name like Seth.

  “What is it that I can do for you?” he asked. We stood in his foyer—an atrium, really—and his voice echoed softly in the thirty feet of empty space between our heads and the skylight above. He made no move to invite us any farther into the house.

  I started. “Do you know a man named Daryl Waxler?”

  “Yes,” he said. Like most men in his income bracket, he knew enough to remain as taciturn as possible when dealing with government representatives.

  “How do you know him?” I asked.

  “He’s a former business associate.”

  “And what kind of business are you in?”

  “Consulting.”

  “And you’ve consulted with Daryl Waxler?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Could you elaborate on that?”

  “With my former employer, I was involved more directly in real estate development. We worked on several projects together.”

  “Did you have a personal relationship with him?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure what you’re implying.”

  “I’m not implying anything. I’m asking you a question. Was your relationship with him social or strictly business?”

  “My former wife and I had dinner on several occasions with him and his late wife.”

  “Would you say you were friends?”

  “We were.”

  “Past tense?”