The Disappearance

by J. F. Freedman

  “And you just couldn’t resist. Sounds like she was a seasoned seductress,” Luke says sarcastically.

  Allison shakes his head. “She was full of teenage juice, but underneath it all she was an innocent kid, despite everything,” he says sadly. “She was only in the eighth grade.” He calculates in his head. “If she was pregnant, that means she was getting it on even earlier, like thirteen.”

  Luke nods. “But not with you,” he challenges Allison, one more time. “Even though the rubbers they found in your place match the ones they found up in the Lancaster’s gazebo.”

  “That was a plant,” Allison says. “That’s so obvious it’s pathetic. Ask my girlfriend, Nicole. She’ll tell you I’ve never used that kind.”

  Luke gets up. He’s heard enough on this subject from Joe Allison. “I’m planning to.”

  Doug Lancaster’s lover, Helena Buchinsky, is the wife of the head of Mason/Dixon Productions, one of the major independent film and television companies in the country. Dark, Rubenesquely voluptuous—she has Armenian, Turkish, Greek, some Czech or Polish in her ancestry—she lies on the deck of her Trancas beach house wearing nothing but a pair of men’s boxer shorts, her body wet with her own perspiration, sun-tan oil, Doug’s sweat. You can smell the reek of sexuality coming from her, not a body smell, a life force.

  They made love as soon as Doug drove his Jaguar convertible down the coast highway from Santa Barbara, in the guest bedroom, where they always have sex when they’re at this house, their preferred place of assignation, since the Buchinskys don’t have full-time live-in help here. She won’t make love with him in the bed she shares with her husband (the same rule applies to her primary house in Brentwood, where she and Doug meet rarely, it’s too dangerous), not for moral reasons or to spare her husband some small indignity, however unknown to him, but because she doesn’t want to take the chance of something foreign being left behind that could be found and used against her. Her prenuptial agreement with Ted, her husband of nine years, specifies only a few reasons he can cut her out of her community property and support, should they divorce. Extramarital sex is the main one, and while she and Doug have been lovers for many years, since long before he and Glenna split, she is ever vigilant. She assumes Ted has her watched from time to time; he may even have pictures of her naked with Doug. But the actual act of sexual congress, she makes sure that’s hidden from the world.

  Helena knows Doug is worried and preoccupied with the arrest of the man who killed his daughter, and the trial that’s on the distant horizon. She knows everything Doug knows: he confides in her more than he ever confided in Glenna. You can always talk to the lover better than the mate, she thinks. It’s the same with her and Teddy, they don’t talk about squat. She knows about the botched bribe. She knows his daughter Emma wasn’t a virgin, that her killer might have been her lover. She knows of Doug’s anger and concern over it, both that it happened and, even worse, now that she’s dead, that the knowledge will become public. And she knows that her lover fears Luke Garrison as an opponent, a man with nothing to lose who for the last three years has lived a life straight out of the ’60s: turn on, tune in, drop out.

  “How’re you doing?” she asks. She speaks in a thick New York accent, as street-sounding as Cathy Moriarty, the actress who played Jake LaMotta’s wife in Raging Bull and, more recently, Harvey Keitel’s in Cop Land. She loves those movies—it’s her old neighborhoods. Cathy’s a friend from way back.

  “Good, now,” he says, running the fingers of one hand along the inside of her thigh closest to him.

  “That’s good,” she responds, sliding her hand down her leg to cover his, stop its stimulating journey. They’ve had their fuck for the day, it was fine, she doesn’t want to get turned on again. And even though her stretch of beach is private and inaccessible, the deck sheltered with darkly tinted glass walls that you can see out of but not in through, and the house itself tucked into a secluded alcove and elevated from the beach, she’s still careful when they’re outside.

  “I mean in general,” she says, “not the last half hour.” She scratches her behind where the sweat’s making it itch. “Get me a Coke, will you?” She points vaguely towards the inside, separated from the deck by open French doors.

  Doug, wearing a bathing suit, gets up and pads into the house, reemerging a moment later with a liter of cold Coca-Cola from the refrigerator, an open bottle of Absolut, and a couple of glasses filled with ice. He knows the layout of this house well, he’s been coming here for a long time now. Dropping down next to her, he hands her the Coke and a glass, pours a couple of fingers of vodka into each glass, drinks from his.

  “In general …” he says.

  “You think he’s gonna investigate.”

  He stares at her. She’s in her soothsayer mode, which is usually right on the money.

  “You,” she says to him. “This lawyer. He’s gonna try to find out what everybody was doing that night, anybody that could’ve had access to your property. That’s how he’s gonna work it for his client, right? See if somebody else could’ve killed Emma. If their time can’t be accounted for,” she adds, staring at him.

  Nothing wrong with her brain, Doug thinks. It’s one of her attractions, all the contradictions in her personality. Along with her blunt directness.

  “Yes,” he agrees, “that would be a strategy a good lawyer might take.”

  She drinks some Coke, crunching a piece of ice in her teeth. “It’s hot today, isn’t it?” She smiles at him. “Can you account for all your time that night?”

  He stares at her. “Yes,” he says slowly, “I can account for my time that night.” He pauses. The unspoken hangs between them like a sea-soaked net, an onerous veil. “Yes, I can.”

  “Are you going to be okay with that? Keep it quiet?”

  “I can account for my time,” he repeats firmly.

  “Then all you have to worry about is making sure Joe Allison gets convicted.”

  “That’s not all I have to worry about, but that would solve most of my problems,” he agrees. “And bring closure to Emma’s memory,” he says with genuine sadness.

  She pulls him to her, his head jammed against her breasts, his mouth grazing the salty nipples, which brings an involuntary shudder from her. “That’s gonna happen,” she tells him with assurance in her heavy Bronx patois. “There will be closure for your daughter. For Emma.”

  Sitting in the living room, the windows thrown open to catch the end-of-the-day breeze, Luke and Riva watch the tape of Joe Allison’s interrogation by Detective Terry Jackson of the Santa Barbara P.D. Luke takes notes, pausing the tape when he wants to write down a salient point.

  “So he admits to a mutual attraction, but no sex,” Riva says. Luke has filled her in on his session with Allison. “I hope he isn’t sandbagging you.”

  He turns to her. “So do I, sweetness. So do I.”

  “Well, it makes him a crummy person, but not a murderer.”

  Luke nods. “He isn’t on trial for being a crummy person.”

  “But you wish he were squeaky-clean.”

  “Yeah. Defending men like him doesn’t make me particularly happy. But someone has to.”

  After watching the tape twice, all the way through, Luke clicks the VCR off. “This is a pretty slippery interview,” he remarks.

  She looks to him for clarification.

  “They never told him they suspected him of anything other than drunk driving,” he explains. He has the transcript of the interview on his lap.

  “But wasn’t that the point of the questioning? That they thought he was involved in the kidnapping, because they found the key ring in his car?” she asks.

  “Exactly.” He thinks for a moment. “I need to find out if the cop out in the field explained that to him, when he gave him the Miranda warning. I’ll bet the farm he didn’t.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “They misled him. They lied to him, actually. As soon as you suspect someone of a crim
e, you have to warn them of that. From what I’m seeing”—he holds up the transcript and points to the blank television screen—“they didn’t. They violated his rights in a very fundamental way.”

  “Could they have told him before they brought him into that room for questioning?”

  Luke shakes his head. “You saw the tape. Allison didn’t have a clue.” Brandishing the transcript, he adds, “He had no idea they were connecting him to Emma Lancaster’s murder. None. They didn’t even tell him it was her key ring.”

  He gets up and goes to the refrigerator for a beer. “Want one?”

  She shakes her head.

  He twists the cap off, licks the rim, starts pacing the room. “This is bullshit. Ray Logan was there. What the hell was he thinking?” Shaking his head, he says, “I know exactly what he was thinking. He wanted the goods on Allison and he didn’t want to fuck things up with a warning. He was afraid Joe would clam up and they’d lose the moment.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I have to go to the judge on this. I’m going to interview that cop, Jackson, and Sheriff Williams too, but there’s no acceptable explanation for this. You have to inform a suspect of his rights, that’s basic.”

  “If it turns out they violated his rights, what happens?” she asks. She can feel his agitation and excitement. It energizes her, seeing him in this mode, the professional on the job.

  “I’m not sure,” he says. He sits on the edge of the couch guzzling some beer. “Technically, their whole justification for arresting and charging him is tainted. They can’t use any evidence they got from him.”

  Her eyes widen.

  “It should be thrown out,” he says vehemently. “But I can’t see any local judge doing that, can you? Ewing’ll look for any wiggle room he can find.” He smiles sardonically. “Can you imagine the screaming that would rise if this were thrown out on a so-called technicality? There’d be a mushroom cloud ten times the size of Hiroshima.”

  “So what are you going to do?” she asks.

  “Check it out. Put them on notice that I won’t tolerate it. File a motion for dismissal at some point, if I have to.” He gets up again, paces around the room—he thinks better on his feet. “I have to put them on notice that they can’t do this.” He pauses, taking another hit from his bottle of Sierra Nevada. “I don’t want to get drawn into Allison’s paranoia, but there’s some fishy stuff going on here. You can make a case out of anything if you twist stuff around enough. I need to dig deeper into this, going back to why Allison was even stopped in the first place.”

  He finishes his beer, obliviously pokes his pinky into the bottle’s neck. The bottle swings from the end of his hand like a swollen appendage. “You don’t bring a charge like this by taking shortcuts. This thing ought to stand on its own merits, clean as a whistle. Otherwise, the whole structure crumbles.” Realizing his finger’s stuck in the bottle neck, he pops it out. “And I’m starting to get itchy to throw a stick of dynamite into the middle of their celebration.”

  Luke’s meeting with Jackson is frustrating. It’s obvious that the detective, under a veneer of civility (a thin veneer), loathes Luke, the turncoat prosecutor. It’s not because Luke’s now working the other side of the aisle; that’s a common enough occurrence in both directions that it is no cause for latent animosity or disdain, although it is a rare thing for the head man to make that move. It’s who, in the eyes of this policeman and of everyone else who knew him when he was Luke Garrison, county district attorney, he has become. It’s the air of hostility that Luke emits unconsciously, the attitude, which to Jackson’s antennae preceded Luke into the room, that all the people who used to make up his professional and, to a great extent, social world are out to screw people over, that’s their secret agenda, and only he and a select few others, who know the real truth about how the law works and the innate corruptness and rottenness of the legal system, can expose it and make it right. And have the courage to do so.

  Luke senses this feeling. He’s encountered it before. It’s ridiculously overblown and simplistic and he doesn’t agree with it, not too much of it, but he acknowledges that it’s part of his makeup now. It pisses him off to be stereotyped that way, but he knows it’s useful. It puts people on the defensive, off balance. This guy is crazy, you don’t know what he’s going to do. Unpredictability can be a powerful weapon.

  “Did you inform Mr. Allison of his rights?” Luke asks, jumping right in. “The right to remain silent, the right to have a lawyer, that anything he said could be used against him? Did you tell him those things?”

  “He’d already been Mirandized,” Jackson says smoothly. “The officer in the field did that. It’s on record.”

  “I know. But did you tell him the reason you brought him in was because he was a suspect in an unsolved murder? He thought he was in here under a DUI.”

  The cop shrugs. “I’m not a mind reader, sir. I don’t know what he thought.”

  “Fine. But you thought he might be connected to Emma Lancaster’s kidnapping and murder.”

  The cop shakes his head. “Not initially.”

  Luke stares at him. Jesus, what chutzpah! “Your people found her key ring in his car, he was brought in here, you questioned him for over half an hour, but you didn’t consider him a suspect? I find that hard to believe, Detective.”

  Another practiced shrug. “I said not initially.”

  “Then what did you think?”

  “That he might have some information that could help us.”

  “What kind of information could that have been?”

  “If someone had given him those keys, and he could remember who it was, that might have been the killer, or someone who knew the killer. That was my initial reaction.”

  Luke smothers his incredulity at the answer, and at the man’s audacity in giving it. “Not that Joe Allison was involved, but that he might know someone who was involved,” he repeats Jackson’s assertion, wanting to make sure he’s hearing this right.

  “That’s correct.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell him that?”

  “Tell him what?”

  “That the keys belonged to Emma Lancaster,” Luke patiently says, “and you were hoping he could remember how they got in his car so you could find out who killed her. Wouldn’t that be the logical approach?”

  He waits for a response, an involuntary reflex reaction. There is none.

  “Unless he was a suspect in your mind, and you didn’t want to give the game away,” Luke continues.

  “I question people my way,” the detective answers. “You might prefer a different approach. That’s how I work.”

  This is going nowhere, Luke sees that clearly. The man isn’t about to budge off his story.

  “When did Allison’s status change from that of an innocent party who might know something that could help your investigation to that of the prime suspect in the investigation?” he asks.

  “When we found additional evidence pointing at him.”

  “So then he became a suspect, and you told him he was a suspect, and informed him of his rights.”

  “Exactly,” Jackson says. “As soon as he became a suspect, we told him, and informed him of his rights under the law.”

  Luke nods. “But if that’s the case, explain something for me, Officer.”

  “Detective,” Jackson corrects him.

  “Sorry,” Luke answers. “Detective. Explain to me—Detective—why the sheriff’s office searched Mr. Allison’s residence if he wasn’t a suspect? How did you get a search warrant if he wasn’t a suspect? What did you tell the judge who issued it—‘we’ve got a guy in custody who isn’t a suspect in a murder case, but we want to search his home anyway because he might be if we find some evidence to prove he is’? That’s kind of ass-backwards, isn’t it?”

  He knows what the search warrant said—he’s read it. It was a fine piece of obscurity and double talk—just enough factual information to allow a judge reason to iss
ue it, but not enough to be successfully challenged at some later date, such as now. These guys are pros, Luke knows. They don’t break the law, but they push it as far as is possible. Nowadays, you don’t get convictions if you don’t. At least that’s their thinking—screw the civil libertarians, bad people need to be put away. A good cop figures out how.

  The shrug again. He must practice that move in front of a mirror, Luke thinks. “It was a precaution,” Jackson says. “To make sure. The judge agreed with us.”

  My ass. “You know what’s interesting?” Luke says.

  “What?”

  “Caramba, the cop who arrested Allison, did think he was a suspect.”

  For the first time in their meeting Jackson reacts, shifting his weight in his chair. Subtle, but Luke notices it.

  “Who says that?” the detective asks carefully.

  “He did.”

  “He did?” Jackson seems genuinely surprised, taken aback. “When?”

  “When I talked to him about it.”

  Jackson thinks about how to react. “I think you misunderstood him” is the answer he comes up with.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “A cop in the field doesn’t make those kinds of judgments.”

  “It’s what he told me.”

  “He was mistaken,” the detective says firmly.

  “He was mistaken about his own judgment? How is that possible?” Luke asks.

  “He was mistaken about—” Jackson stops. Any answer he gives will be the wrong one. The right answer is no answer. “Whatever Officer Caramba thought doesn’t matter,” he says, changing directions. “It’s up to the detectives to make those decisions. And the brass.” He leans forward, stares hard at Luke. “We did not think of Joe Allison as a suspect when we began talking to him. Period.”

  Luke leans back. This is as far as he goes today. “One more thing,” he says as a preamble to departing. “What was the result of Mr. Allison’s sobriety test? I haven’t been able to find that.”