by David Chill
“No,” I responded. “And this actually doesn’t have much to do with you at all.”
“What a relief.”
I pulled out a photo of Tyler Briggs and showed it to her. “Have you seen this man before? Maybe here at the motel?”
The woman inspected the photo for a few seconds. “I’ve seen him. He was here last week. Saw him at the ice machine. He was wearing a baseball cap, but it was the same guy. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. I think I might have seen him on TV once, but who knows. Half of L.A. has been on TV at some point.”
“Okay,” I said carefully. “Did you see a woman with him?”
“I did. She was helping him get ice. He looked kind of unsteady, like he had had one too many drinks at happy hour. Maybe a few too many.”
“Did it look as if there were any problem between them? Any animosity?”
“No, not at all. In fact, they looked like they were having great fun. Giggling about getting the right pieces of ice, that sort of thing.”
“What did the woman look like?” I said.
“She was blonde, a little petite I guess. Very pretty, though. Maybe in her thirties.”
I considered this and thought about how to present the next question. “We have reason to believe this woman may have been involved in a capital crime,” I said slowly. “If we were to have you sit down with a police sketch artist, do you think you’d be able to describe her?”
“I’m not sitting down with anyone from the police,” she told me.
I stared at her. “May I ask why?” I inquired politely, thinking I might need to have Juan send over a few officers to coerce her back to the Purdue Division.
“The person I’m meeting tonight is a public figure. I don’t want to have to explain anything about my business or his. Or why we’re here. Or let the world know, especially his family, about what’s been going on with us. You do understand, I hope.”
I did understand indeed, the understanding that her personal comfort was more important than catching a criminal who was intimately involved in one, or perhaps two homicides. And that this woman’s own moral elasticity would allow her to have a regularly scheduled sexual rendezvous with a married man, but not cooperate with law enforcement to catch a cold blooded killer.
“I recognize your concern,” I said as sympathetically as I could. “And you’ll understand why it is of the utmost importance that we find this woman. I need to see your driver’s license. Now. Or you’ll be placed under arrest, and you may be charged with aiding and abetting a murderer.”
“Oh please,” she responded. “If you’re trying to scare me, you’ll need to work harder at that. I didn’t do anything wrong, and your charges will be laughed out of court.”
“Do you have the time or inclination to go to court and find out?” I asked pointedly. ”And does the man you’re meeting tonight want to be dragged into this as well?”
She stopped and stared at me without verbalizing her answer. I continued.
“You’re withholding information from the police,” I said, knowing full well I wasn’t the police, and there was no crime in failing to provide a pushy private investigator with a description of another motel guest. But she did finally begin rifling through her purse and eventually handed me her driver’s license. The photo matched, and I wrote down her information. Peggy Merman, lived in Pacific Palisades, age 52. She looked good for 52.
“This has to do with the Glasscock murder,” she said suddenly.
“That’s right,” I answered, eyeing her carefully. “And just so you know, we can keep your identity private. Same with whoever you’re meeting here.”
“And just so you know,” she said, “you really don’t need a sketch artist. I can point you to exactly who that woman was. I don’t have a name, but I know where she worked.”
I stared at her. “Go on.”
“On Sunday afternoon, I turned on the news, it was right after one of those football games ended.”
“Was it the Chargers game?” I asked.
“Might have been. I’m really not much of a football fan. But I tuned in just as the game was ending, and they cut away to the local news.”
“What channel?”
“Probably channel 2, that’s what I normally watch. Anyway, they had reporters on the scene where Colin Glasscock was killed, and they were interviewing staffers from Glasscock’s office. That pretty little blonde was one of them. I thought it was odd that I had just seen her here Friday night. I didn’t make much of it at the time, everyone has a private life. Do you think she was involved somehow in Glasscock’s murder?”
I did indeed. Whoever was with Tyler Briggs at the Snuggle Inn last Friday night was the one who knocked him out with a date-rape drug, and the one who got Tyler’s fingerprints on the murder weapon. They were the one who dropped his baseball cap in the alley behind Glasscock’s office. All to make it look like Tyler Briggs had done the shooting.
*
I didn’t bother to call Juan Saavedra just yet, because if Peggy Merman was correct, we indeed wouldn’t need the services of a sketch artist. I drove home quickly and gave Gail and Marcus hugs before rushing into the den and turning on the TV. I checked the Recorded Programs on my DVR, and was relieved the Chargers game had not been deleted. Marcus had forgotten all about watching a replay of the game, as five-year-olds are prone to do. I fast forwarded past the game and onto the local news, and there she was. Short, blonde, pretty, and curvaceous. Just like in person. She was talking about how much Colin Glasscock had meant to the community and how much he meant to the staff. Her eyes glistened with tears. It was quite an act.
I put in a call to Juan, but all I got was his voice mail. I left a message asking him to call me right away, saying it was urgent. I thought of calling Orlando Brown, but I knew there was a Laker game on, and also that bringing him into this might cause more harm than good. In the end, my natural curiosity won out and I knew I would approach her myself. And since I didn’t know much about this Peggy Merman, and whether or not she actually knew the curvy blonde – and might inform her that I was on her trail – I decided to move quickly. Thanks to the internet, I could find out where Emma Wick lived, and she lived remarkably close to us. I thought of telling Gail where I was going, but my job worried her enough. And I knew she would try and convince me to let the police handle this.
Emma Wick resided in a townhouse on Marcasel Avenue in Mar Vista, an unusually wide, sweeping street that was quiet and lined with palm trees. Only a few cars were parked on the street, most were in driveways, and the air was still and silent. There was a half-moon out, enough to give the neighborhood sufficient light. It was about a week past being full, well beyond the type of moon that always seems to bring the craziest people out of the shadows.
I found Unit 4, the entrance tucked into the side of the building, about fifty feet removed from the street. I rang the doorbell, and it was answered quickly. Emma Wick was dressed in faded jeans and a scoop-neck red sweater that revealed generous cleavage. She gave me a puzzled look.
“Hi,” she said tentatively. “Your Gail’s husband, aren’t you?”
“Yes. May I come in?”
She opened the door curiously and allowed me to enter. She didn’t offer me anything to drink or to sit down. She looked past me at something across the room. I turned and looked too but I didn’t see anything.
“What is this about?” she asked.
“It’s mostly about the murders of Colin Glasscock and Tyler Briggs. I think I know how you did them. What’s missing from the picture is why you did them.”
She stared at me for a second and started to move across the room. I grabbed her tightly by the arm, and she lunged, but she only succeeded in tripping and falling to the floor.
“No!” she screamed.
I yanked her arms behind her, when I realized I had forgotten my plastic cuffs in the Pathfinder. There was no way to go get these, so I improvised, ripping an electric cord from a computer
printer, to bind her hands behind her back. It wasn’t perfect, but nothing about this case was perfect. I looked across the room again. I walked over and opened the drawer of a maple end table and looked inside. It had a stack of magazines and a few knick-knacks. There was also a Glock 19. I took a tissue and pulled it out.
“I think I’ve hit the lottery.”
“There’s no law against having a gun,” she protested, squirming to try and free her hands.
“There are plenty of laws against shooting people.”
“You can’t prove anything. You don’t know a thing.”
“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I’ll paint you a picture. There’s some pieces missing. Feel free to fill them in. Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.”
She stared at me and said nothing.
“You and the councilman were having an affair. You were far from his only conquest, but you thought you were special. You were on his staff. You were close to him. You knew everything about him, his schedule, his private life, his rocky marriage. He was successful, and he was likeable. And he was a good-looking guy, so you did what a thousand women do every day. You fell in love with a married man.”
She nodded ever so vaguely, in a way that struck me as almost involuntary. I continued, not exactly knowing what I was talking about, piecing it together as I went, but nevertheless detailing a textbook case that just seemed to repeat itself. I might not be right on everything, but I was sure I was getting warm.
“And he told you he’d leave his wife. And he told you the affairs with other women meant nothing to him. That he couldn’t say no to them, that they were the aggressors. And he always came back to you. But after a while you finally figured out he wasn’t going to leave his wife and he wasn’t going to stop screwing other women. The difference here was that most women in your situation would hurl a few insults, a veiled threat, or maybe even a lamp. In your case, it escalated.”
She shook her head. “Again. You have no proof. You have no evidence. No one will believe you. Your word against mine. And I’m a respected civil servant.”
I laughed. “Not so civil apparently. But there’s going to be proof. Lots of it. The gun in the alley to start off.”
“Try finding fingerprints,” she sniffed.
“Maybe we’ll look at whose fingerprints were on the bullets left in the magazine. And maybe the steering wheel on Tyler’s car after you dumped his body. Not to mention the eyewitnesses who saw a light blue Mercedes pull up to that underpass in the middle of the night. Oh, there’s proof. Bunches of it.”
She stared at me. I still thought I saw her arms wiggle. I continued.
“Back to your motive. Maybe your breaking point came when you finally confronted him and he turned you away, maybe he disrespected you somehow, maybe he set you off in one of the hundreds of ways that men can set off women. Whatever he said or did outraged you, and made shooting Colin in the head a lot more appealing than simply walking out the door and never seeing him again.”
“A fool,” she muttered blankly.
“Excuse me?”
“I did confront him. I demanded he leave his wife.”
“I take it the answer to that was no.”
“It wasn’t just no. He said a man in his position couldn’t afford a scandal. He told me I should have known that. He was a public official, a community leader. People looked up to him. He asked me how I could be so foolish. He thought I was a fool for thinking he’d end his marriage for me. He said that would also end his career. He … he laughed at me,” she said, her voice quivering, her eyes giving off the appearance that she could have been in a dreamlike state.
“Okay,” I said.
“I could handle rejection. I could not handle the scorn.”
“I understand that. Yeah. I get it. But here’s what I don’t get. No one was in the office. It was after 5:00 pm on a Friday. I know what it’s like to work for the city. No one else was there. All you had to do was leave. But you had to go hatch another plan.”
“I was scared.”
“Of course you were scared. It’s scary to kill someone. But you could have gotten away with it. And even if you’d been caught, something like this, a crime of passion, even shooting a public official, maybe you would have spent a few years in prison and then you’d walk. And with a good defense attorney, you might even have had a slim chance of getting off. Juries don’t always get it right. But you had to cover your tracks. My question is why Tyler Briggs? Why did you pick him to be the fall guy?”
She rolled her eyes. “I met him at a holiday party a few weeks ago. He came onto me. His wife was ten feet away and he’s hitting on me. Are all men pigs? Do any of them have a shred of decency?”
I didn’t respond immediately, and I couldn’t help thinking that this was coming from a woman who had been sexually involved with a married man. It’s funny how life can look very different when you’re seeing it through a different lens.
“There are probably a few,” I said, careful not to get into a back-and-forth on ethics and morals with a double murderer. “So you called Tyler. Probably from a pay phone so it wouldn’t be traced. That is, if there are any pay phones left these days”
“There’s one at the 7-Eleven. On Sepulveda.”
“Yeah,” I said, wondering vaguely if she knew of that tidbit in advance, but decided it was more trivia than relevant. “And you asked Tyler to meet you for a drink. Somehow The Alibi Room is where you had your rendezvous. I imagine you made your intentions known to Tyler right away. The bartender said you didn’t spend a lot of time flirting over drinks.”
“No,” she said quietly. “No need.”
“You ended up at the Snuggle Inn. You dropped some roofies, that date-rape drug, into Tyler’s drink at some point, and that knocked him out. Before he passed out, you had sex with him at the motel; Tyler seemed to remember that part, anyway. He said you were hot.”
A brief flash of interest crossed Emma’s face, but it quickly went away.
“Where’d you get the drug, by the way? The roofies?” I asked.
“They’re not hard to find. If you know where to look.”
“And the syringe?”
She shrugged. “It’s part of a needle exchange program the city’s involved in. I slipped one in my purse.”
“Sounds like you’ve been planning something for a while,” I commented.
“My situation with Colin was going nowhere. I needed to do something. I just didn’t quite know what. ”
“Okay,” I said, starting to wonder how much of this murderous rampage had been pre-mediated and how much had been thought up on the fly. My guess was it might have been a combination, the furious thoughts turning to possibilities over time, but once she pulled the trigger and killed Colin Glasscock, some of the next steps had to have been improvised. It was part of the scenario. When a person shoots someone they love, much of their thought pattern goes haywire, at least for a little while.
“Then after Tyler passed out, you got his fingerprints all over the gun. And you also took his baseball cap. The green one with the M on it. You know that was his Miami Hurricanes cap, right?”
“I didn’t know that exactly.”
“I thought it was funny that his name was printed inside the cap. Grown men don’t normally do that. But the police will check the handwriting, as well as the prints on the syringe. I’m surprised you left that at the hotel. Maybe you weren’t thinking straight.”
“Uh-huh,” she said blankly.
“Then you used the syringe to shoot him up with roofies so he’d have a good, long sleep. Maybe you figured he wouldn’t wake up at all. You returned to the alley, planted the gun and the baseball cap, and waited for the police to put two and two together and end up with three. Of course it helped that you were the one who told them about Tyler supposedly entering the office at 5:00 on a Friday evening. Right before you went home. You were the last one in the office. No one else could have known who might have come in afterward t
o see him.”
“How do you know that?” she asked weakly.
“Because the arresting detective told me. He just didn’t say who the eyewitness was. Turned out to be you. The police go and arrest Tyler and you figure your problems are solved. They match his prints on the gun that had just been fired, see the baseball cap with Tyler’s name on it, and it’s game, set and match. Sure, he’d tell the cops about this sexy blonde he picked up, and maybe they might even check it out with the bar or the motel, but you’re still the mystery woman. No one knew you at either place. And again, even if you did get fingered, it was still Tyler’s prints on the gun. Which leads me to a question. Whose gun was it?”
Emma gave an odd little smile. “Colin’s. He had a few of them.”
“All were Glock 19s?” I asked.
“I don’t know what you call them. But yeah they were all the same. Colin had received death threats. He was scared. He carried one and kept another in his desk.”
“And you lifted both of them.”
She shrugged and smiled again.
“You used one to kill Colin and the other to kill Tyler. That leads us to the next bit of the puzzle. Which is why did you bother to shoot Tyler? The police had him, they had him but good, and it looked like an open-and-shut case. You were in the clear.”
“Was I?”
I looked at her, and it dawned on me. “Okay. You realized Tyler could implicate you, and that was a risk. You got lucky when he kept quiet after his arrest and lawyered up. Didn’t say a word to the police. But that might have changed over time. So, you arranged another rendezvous, maybe to talk things over, maybe you said you had an idea about who really killed Glasscock. Led him on. But I’ll bet you also promised to give Tyler the ride of his life.”
Emma brought out her smile. It was something she seemed to dial up at will. “Something like that.”
“And at some point the other night, you pulled the gun on him and shot him in the abdomen. Tried to make it look like a suicide. Only problem was you shot him multiple times. People who commit suicide are only able to pull the trigger once. Were you really trying to make it look like a suicide when you dumped the body? No blood spatter, nothing that fit the profile. You didn’t even leave the gun there.”