At First Sight

by Stephen J. Cannell

  “It’s a lot of work, Bob.”

  “Nah,” he grinned. “I live for this stuff.” But he was blushing again, his ears turning pink.

  She reached out and took his hand. “Bob, you can’t possibly know how grateful I …”

  But he cut her off. “Don’t say nothin’, Mrs. Ellis. It’s just my job.”

  Of course, she knew Bob had been ordered to put the case aside. He had a folder full of fresh crimes that his homicide supervisor had directed him to focus on. Nobody on the Charlotte PD thought there was much chance of ever solving Chandler’s hit-and-run. While it stayed active, Bob could only put a minimal amount of time in on it each week. But that didn’t stop him. He had given her his promise, so he was working it on his off-hours, on weekends and holidays. Working it for her and for his dead wife, Althea.

  “You need to take some time off. Take a vacation,” she told him. “Now you’re the one looking tired.”

  “What’m I gonna do, Mrs. Ellis?” he said, sadly. “Where you think I should go? Maybe to some Caribbean hotel all by myself, sit in a room and just look at the TV?”

  “Don’t you ever think about getting married again?” she asked him.

  “No, ma’am,” he replied. He reached for his Bible and started thumbing through it. “Bible says I gotta play it this way. Lotta people think I’m nuts, but that don’t matter t’me’tall.” He found the verse he wanted. “Mark 11 says, ‘Whosoever shall put away his wife and marry another, committeth adultery.’” He closed the Bible and looked up at her. “Can’t go against the scriptures.”

  “I think that means while she’s still alive, Bob,” Paige smiled.

  “Yep. Ya might be right, but y’see, in my mind Althea is alive. She’ll never die. Think about Althea ever day … think about her, talk to her … So it’s not like I’m alone. But I can’t take her on a vacation either. Can’t walk on the beach with her, hold her hand, or go swimmin’. So I figure I just might as well stick around here and catch this guy who hit Chandler.”

  She watched him as he stood and picked up his Bible.

  “Best be gettin’ started. Workin’ only weekends is gonna take me a mess a’time t’get through all these.”

  “Thank you, Bob,” she said. “I can’t tell you how much it means …”

  “You’re welcome, Mrs. Ellis,” he said, blushing again. Then he turned and walked back to his car—a rumpled man clutching a Bible who had the softest gray eyes she had ever seen.

  CHAPTER 20

  I SOLD BESTMARKET.COM IN LATE SEPTEMBER AND managed to get out of that burning building with just a little under two million dollars. But as I sailed out the door, I had mixed feelings. It was like bailing out of your corporate jet at twenty thousand feet. It felt good when the chute opened, but it hurt like hell to watch something you once loved fly on without you.

  However, I had bigger problems—much bigger.

  Just before the company sale became final, I learned that Evelyn had hired a forensic accountant. What, you might ask, is a forensic accountant? It’s a guy who specializes in hunting down hidden assets.

  Here’s how I stumbled onto this despicable fact. I’d started to record Evelyn’s phone calls, so when she and Mickey talked, I would have an incriminating tape of them planning one of their Vaseline parties. I’d removed the speaker element from the garage telephone so Evelyn couldn’t hear the background change when I picked up the receiver and started recording. You see, back then I was still counting on getting a divorce. But all I’d managed to record were conversations where Mickey D and Evelyn discussed his body. Believe me, it was a gagger listening to hours of that drivel.

  “Mickey, I really don’t think you need to work on rear delts anymore. Your shoulders are simply gorgeous. I’d stick with lats and traps, and keep pounding out crunches, keep the ab work up.”

  They went on endlessly with that shit. As far as I was concerned, the tapes absolutely proved they were doing the sheet dance. But I also knew that since they hadn’t actually discussed screwing, the recordings would prove very little in a court of law. You had to know Evelyn to get the drift, to understand the subtext.

  During one of these phone tapings, when she thought I was out of the house, she called some guy named Paul Delmonte. When I heard his name I thought, who the fuck is this asshole? But it quickly came out that he was a forensic accountant she’d hired to dig through my bank records. Apparently he was checking for wire transfers to hidden offshore accounts. He told Evelyn he suspected me of hiding funds someplace like the Cayman Islands, which in fact I was. He said, if he could prove I did it in anticipation of a divorce, then it would constitute criminal fraud.

  After listening to this, I came to the hard-fought realization that it was time to step up and deal with this bloodless marriage once and for all.

  You’re probably asking yourself, what the hell does that mean? Good question. But before I explain, just hear me out, okay, because my chain of logic is important.

  Since my recorded phone conversations with Mickey D hadn’t done the job, I’d been flirting with the idea of hiring a P.I. to follow them around and gather evidence for the divorce, get some long lens shots of Evelyn over at Mickey D’s place, going at it. But the more I pondered this, the more I realized that hiring a private detective was potentially a big mistake.

  While naming Mickey D as a correspondent would be helpful in a divorce action, it wouldn’t solve the problem of dividing up my estate. As I already mentioned, California is a community property state and the courts take a very hard line when it comes to dividing up assets. I had been carefully siphoning off some of the two million from the sale of the company, working up phony expenses, which I could deduct as costs from the total, wiring the proceeds to the Caymans. That’s the criminal fraud her accountant was talking about. I doubted the D.A. would file on it, but it would definitely weigh against me in a divorce action.

  As soon as her accountant found the money, it would eventually get returned. Then Evelyn would destroy me—use the fact that I’d tried to embezzle from her to gain sympathy with the judge. Once that happened, the odds were good she’d get even more than her half. Plus, I’d be stuck paying for her divorce lawyers and accountants, as well as a lotta other stuff. Bottom line: After federal and state taxes, I’d be lucky to net a few hundred grand. You can see how grossly unfair all this is.

  But wait—it gets even worse.

  I have a friend who does divorce law. I got him drunk one night, and without letting him suspect I was thinking of dumping Evelyn, I lured him into a discussion on California divorce. I couldn’t believe what this guy said. He told me about something called “goodwill.” Wait till you hear about this piece of bullshit. Goodwill is not something one person has for another. In a California divorce, a dollar amount can be attached to my reputation as a businessman—my “goodwill” in the marketplace. The way this goes, since Evelyn was my wife while my reputation was being built, she potentially shares in any money it might eventually produce. That means even my future earnings are at risk. Can you believe this?

  Then my lawyer friend tells me the bad news on personal property. All of my personal stuff—my car, my golf clubs, everything goes on the pile—gets sold and divided up. But everything she owns—all her stuff—is not personal property. It’s all “gifts.” That’s right, you heard me. The jewelry that we couldn’t afford that she bought for herself without telling me is not community property. It’s a fucking gift!

  I can feel my blood pressure going up again just thinking about it. But I wasn’t going to let her get away with it. I wasn’t going to let her stand there with one hand on my wallet, the other on Mickey D’s schlong, and just pick me clean. I’d worked too damned hard. So what’s the answer?

  Okay, let’s revisit the idea of maybe getting somebody to take Evelyn off the count.

  Now you’re probably saying, “You can’t be serious, Chick. You mean you’re actually going to kill her?”

  Just stick wit
h me for a minute, okay? When you boil it all down, the criminal fraud, the goodwill, the fact that she ends up with everything I sweated and sacrificed to earn, what other choice do I have? It’s either that or walk out of this thing with nothing but the lint in my pocket and the potential that whatever I earn in the future is partially hers.

  So yes. The answer is you’re damn right. I was definitely thinking about it. However, the more I examined the idea, the more I realized this was the most complicated logistics problem I’d ever faced. Obviously, I didn’t want to do it myself, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that hiring a hit man was not an acceptable option either. If I tried that, several things could conceivably happen, all of them bad.

  One: The guy I tried to hire could turn me down. Then if I got somebody else to do it, the first guy would know I was behind the killing, and he would own me for the rest of my life. He could blackmail me or, worse still, if in the future he were to get in trouble for some criminal action himself, he could sell me out to the D.A. to get his sentence lessened.

  Two: My hired hit man could say yes to me, do the job, and then come back on me demanding more money later. If he’s a professional killer, what am I gonna do? Say no? I couldn’t go to the cops. I’d be fucked.

  Three: In order to find a killer, I’d have to put the word out on the street that I was looking for somebody. More and more, I read that the cops often find out about these things, street rumor being the profitable growth industry that it is. If the police got wind that I was looking for a hitter, they could send in some undercover cop with a shaved head and an eye patch to meet me in a bar. Once I try and hire him, I’m toast. Intent to commit.

  I’m sure there are more problems, but these were enough to scare me off the idea of trying to hire professional help. I also realized that I had no friends or family who had the credentials or inclination to go that far out on a limb for me. That meant if I wanted her dead, I had no other choice but to do it myself. I had to kill Evelyn with my own hands.

  Over the next week or two I tried to think of the best way to do it. I tried to plot it out, using cold, hard logic, making myself go over it time and again.

  I finally came up with the following plan:

  I decided I would do a carjacking, and during the crime, I would shoot Evelyn through the driver’s side window of the car.

  Why did I decide to do it that way? Because carjacking is the new crime du jour in L.A., and during many, the dumbass vehicle owner dies fighting for the keys to his Suburban. Also, most if not all carjacks are stranger crimes, not committed by family or friends.

  So here’s how I did it.

  On Friday morning, the second week of November, I went out to the garage and discovered that the Porsche was gone. Evelyn and Mickey D were off buzzing Malibu with the top down, looking hot and sexy, cruising the strand in matching Lycra. I had been waiting for the right day, a day when they borrowed my car, but a lot of other variables had to also be in place.

  I hurried back inside and looked at Evelyn’s calendar. Luck was with me, because she had a hair appointment scheduled for four-thirty that afternoon. So far so good. Evelyn can’t drive a stick shift, so that meant Mickey would drive her home and switch back to his car. He parks down the street. After he left, she’d drive her Mercedes to her hair appointment.

  I went down the hall and checked on Melissa, who kept Bride-of-Dracula hours staying out all night and sleeping all day. My angry daughter was cutting Zs in her room, dreaming of biker rallies or crystal meth orgies—whatever. She needed to be here for my plan to work.

  Then I put on a pair of driving gloves I had bought for this occasion, went back out to the garage, and wiped down the inside of Evelyn’s car.

  I had an old army .45 hidden in my closet that I’d found in the weeds of a vacant lot behind our house a few years before. For some reason, when I found it, I didn’t turn it in to the police. Why had I kept it? Well, I’m not exactly sure. Maybe I thought there would come a time when I would need an untraceable firearm. Maybe I just liked the way it felt in my hand. Maybe it was something as simple as finder’s keepers. Or, here’s a big one. Maybe all of this was written down in the big book for me. Maybe my killing Evelyn was part of our preordained personal destinies.

  I figured this gun had been ditched by somebody who had a criminal record. It had probably been stolen or used in a crime. At any rate, the important thing was, it couldn’t be traced back to me.

  Shortly after I found it, I bought a box of .45 ammo, went out to a shooting range and test-fired the thing. It worked fine. I didn’t hit much, but in the army I’d learned that .45s were designed for use up close and not as target pistols.

  I loaded it, making sure to wear gloves when I put the .45 shells into the clip. I’ve read my share of Michael Connelly and T. Jefferson Parker crime novels. I’m no dummy, and I understood it’s possible for the cops to get a print hit off an ejected cartridge.

  Once I had the car prepped, I put the gun, sans the loaded clip, under the seat, wrapped in a bunch of old newspapers. Then I put on jeans, a T-shirt, dark sunglasses, and a ball cap. With this disguise in place, I drove her car back to the car wash on Adams.

  Delroy, the eighteen-year-old carjack-felon I’d overheard in the manager’s office a month ago, was still working here. He was a finisher, which was perfect. Delroy was standing with another sullen youth, holding a chamois and a bottle of Windex, scowling at the line of cars like they were constipated turds.

  I counted cars and timed it so when Evelyn’s Mercedes came off the line at the end of the wash, Delroy would be next up and get the car. He opened the door, flopped in behind the wheel, and drove it to a place where he could wipe down the water spots and do the tires and windows.

  I walked over and watched him work. Delroy wasn’t a happy guy. He was careless and left water spots everywhere. As I neared him, his animal magnetism hit me—his vibe. He was a menacing kid with impressive arms, which he displayed, having ripped the sleeves off of his blue car-wash jumpsuit. He exuded a murderous aura, if there is such a thing.

  “Can y’get the dash?” I asked him.

  He glared at me. “Say what?”

  “There’s still a lotta dust on the dash,” I said.

  He shot me his murder-one stare. “Ain’t no fuckin’ dust on your dash, Jim.”

  “Do I need to get the manager?” I said, hoping this wasn’t going to turn into some kind of altercation. He held my gaze for a few seconds, but finally turned with insolent grace, yanked the door open, got in again, and ran the rag carelessly over Evelyn’s gold leather dash.

  “You didn’t clean the rearview mirror,” I complained.

  “Shee-it,” Delroy muttered as he hit it with some Windex, then wiped it dry.

  “You moved it,” I persisted.

  “The fuck?”

  “You moved the mirror. I just saw you. Straighten it back. You should leave it like you found it.”

  “Hey, Mayonnaise, do I look like yo’ fuckin’ nigger?” he muttered, but he straightened the mirror.

  When he finally climbed out of the car, I pointed under the seat. “What about all that?” I said, indicating the edge of the wad of newspapers poking out from under the seat. “Could you get that trash out from under there? I paid to get this car cleaned.”

  By then, Delroy’d had enough of me. He was sparking anger, wondering how he could take my head off and not go back to prison for it.

  “I guess I’ll just have to get Juan,” I sniveled, starting toward the manager’s office.

  Delroy growled something at me that I didn’t hear, but as I turned back, he had already begun to fish for the trash under the seat. With elaborate fuck-you slowness, he started to remove the rumpled-up newspapers. As I mentioned, I had hidden the .45 in the middle of the wad, and Delroy quickly found it. He pulled the gun out, held it pointed carelessly in my direction, and grinned as if I’d just signed up to get my asshole stretched.

  “Got you
rself a strap under here, m’man. You licensed to pack this chunck a chrome? Still wanna talk to Fat Juan?” He kept smiling, the gold-boxed front teeth glinting in bright California sunlight.

  “Just put it back,” I ordered.

  He held it for a long time, trying to make me think he was about to shoot me right there on the car-wash finishing line. Of course, the clip wasn’t in, so nobody was going to get shot. At least not yet.

  “Put it back,” I said firmly.

  Slowly, Delroy replaced the gun under the seat, smiling at me the entire time, like finding the gun had somehow made me his personal property—his yard bitch.

  I pushed past him, got in the car, and drove home.

  Once I arrived, I grabbed a prepacked backpack that contained a plastic raincoat, a change of clothes, shoes, hat, and socks. Then I checked on Melissa again. My angry daughter was still zonked. So far, so good.

  I went into the den and poured myself a stiff scotch on the rocks for courage. Then I sat in my upholstered club chair and waited for my adulterous wife to come home.

  CHAPTER 21

  A LOT OF THE GREAT FEMALE MARATHONERS today, like Ethiopia’s Getenesh Wami and Kenya’s Helena Kirop, are from high altitudes and hot climates. The heat and thin air helps them with their training. Paige, on the other hand, trained in Charlotte, North Carolina, which was at sea level and freezing cold in winter. Wami and Kirop are light and almost seem to be built out of titanium, with no upper body—all legs and narrow shoulders. They carry what weight they have in their thighs and butts. Paige, on the other hand, had broad shoulders and carried her weight high. She’d started out in college as a middle-distance runner, so her strides tended to be less fluid and more choppy, but since Chandler had died, she’d been training more diligently, and her split times on 10Ks had come down to just under seven-minute miles—6:49 to be exact.

  Since that terrible night when she learned of Chandler’s death, her runs had been an oasis of sorts, where she could focus on the effort, and everything else faded away. As she ran, her mind miraculously cleared, and the Mean Reds were blown out of her like noxious exhaust. She began to contemplate her future. But the lingering anger—the Mean Reds—were always right behind her, chasing her like a swarm of gnats, waiting for her to slow down so they could engulf her again.