by Tyler Dilts
“Where’d they find it?”
“Some Serbo-Croatian crew in the valley,” he said. “We’re running them down now. Looking for possible Long Beach connections.”
“Keep me in the loop, okay?” I’d worked several cases involving eastern European gangs in the last few years, but none with any known connections that fit.
“I will,” he said. Then he added, “As much as I can.”
Back at my desk, I found a voice mail from Ethan. “Only one set of prints from the Kobayashi Maru apartment,” he said. “But no matches to anything in the databases. Maybe we’ll get a hit on the DNA.”
Maybe, I thought. And maybe Kobe would turn out to be one of those Asian Serbians we always hear so much about.
“Somehow it never occurred to me that I’d have to get a new car,” I told Julia on the phone. After a pit stop at home to pick up fresh clothes, I was settling in for another evening at Jen’s house. The days were getting shorter, but dusk was still hanging in the air.
“What do you think you’ll get?”
“I don’t want a new car,” I said. “I want my Camry.”
“It was pretty old. Didn’t you say it had a lot of miles on it?”
“Two hundred fifty-seven thousand.”
“Danny, I don’t know much about cars, but I know that’s a lot. You even said you didn’t think it would last much longer.”
“I know. It’s just that I thought it would go from natural causes.”
I thought I heard her stifling a laugh. “What are natural causes for a car?”
“I don’t know. A cracked engine block? Transmission cancer?”
She went ahead and laughed out loud.
“I know how it sounds,” I said. “One of my first homicide cases was a ninety-three-year-old lady. Grandmother, great-grandmother, big family, everybody loved her. A stray bullet from a drive-by went through the living-room window right into her chest. I could never shake that. To live so long and then die just like that. It didn’t feel right.”
“Would it have been better if she had to suffer for months with some debilitating illness?”
“No,” I said.
“Is that what you’d want?”
When I realized we weren’t really talking about my car anymore, I said, “You like your Subaru, right?”
I used to listen to the BBC Overnight broadcast on KPPC, one of the local public-radio stations, when I couldn’t sleep. There was something I found relaxing about the British voices reporting stories that were vaguely interesting. It had just the right balance. If my insomnia was particularly bad, I could focus and pay attention, and that would distract me from the thoughts running incessantly through my head. If it was a calmer night, though, I could let my attention drift and the voices became a kind of white noise that was just strong enough to hold the silence at bay and lull me into a kind of sleepless relaxation. I’d often find myself struggling to maintain that state at two a.m., when the programming transitioned from the BBC to Morning Edition. The American voices were never quite as calming.
More recently, I’d taken to listening to podcasts. I got sucked in quickly and before I knew it had subscribed to more than a dozen. Mystery Show had become a particular favorite. It was kind of a parody of our cultural obsession with the mystery genre, undertaking a new and admittedly minor investigation with each episode. How did a book written by an author friend of the host, Starlee Kine, wind up being photographed in the hands of Britney Spears? Could she find the owner of an unusual belt buckle that had been at the bottom of a friend’s junk drawer for years? How tall was Jake Gyllenhaal, really? What struck me about Mystery Show was the way Kine would follow the threads and loose ends that inevitably arose as she looked for clues and doggedly pursued lead after lead to the people whose stories, while not directly connected to the main narrative, imbued the case with genuine humanity. Julia and Harlan had both come into my life the same way.
But that night I’d tried listening for a while and found myself unable to summon the small degree of focus and concentration needed to pay attention. I’d keep zoning out and realizing I’d missed thirty seconds or a minute or more. I’d hit the little counterclockwise-circular-arrow icon to back up again and again until I found something I remembered. The fourth time I went all the way back to the Stamps.com pitch, I decided to give up.
It was long past midnight. If I’d been home I would have gotten dressed and gone out for a walk. Of course, I knew walking around Long Beach alone in the middle of the night, even in a neighborhood as nice as Jen’s, wasn’t the wisest of moves, but in terms of self-destructive cop behavior, it ranked pretty low on the scale.
I kept thinking about that afternoon in the parking lot. Something so simple, walking a block up the street to the Potholder, something I’d done so many times before. But I froze. Or at least I would have if Stan hadn’t come along. What would I have done if he hadn’t showed up when he did? Would I have a taken a few deep breaths, gotten a hold of myself, and strolled off to lunch? Or would the anxiety have gripped me so tightly that I wouldn’t have been able to overcome it? What would I have done? Could I have even made it back up to the squad room, or would I have humiliated myself by losing my shit right there in front of everybody?
I’d been in dangerous and life-threatening situations before without being rattled at all. When I’d been in uniform, I’d faced bigger and more tangible dangers on practically a weekly basis. Where was this fear coming from? It was true that I’d never had to deal with so direct and sustained a threat as the one the bombing represented, but how could I be afraid of walking alone to lunch?
The photos of my car were working their way into my mental feedback loop, too. There was no way I would have survived if I’d been in the car. What would it have been like? It’s standard procedure for homicide detectives to tell victims’ families that their loved ones had died instantly. That’s one of the many lies that we’re not only allowed, but often encouraged, to tell. And it’s a good lie. It brings comfort. No one wants to know that their loved one was in excruciating pain and very likely aware that they were dying for seconds or even minutes before they expired. My death from the explosion probably would really have been instantaneous. That didn’t make it any less disturbing.
I sat up in the guest bed and wondered how pissed off Jen would be if I went out for a walk. After a few minutes, I realized that she wouldn’t be pissed off at all if she didn’t know. But it didn’t matter, anyway. I knew I had to walk and I had to do it by myself. Not only because my nighttime walks were so ingrained in my routine, but because, after my near–anxiety attack, I needed to prove to myself that the afternoon incident had been a one-off experience, an aberration, and not something that I was going to let affect me any more than it already had.
The weather app on my phone told me it was still seventy-three degrees outside, so I pulled on a pair of shorts and my walking shoes. My shoulder holster went on over the t-shirt and under a short-sleeved plaid button-up. It wouldn’t conceal well through the thin fabric, but it was late enough that I didn’t really care. I wasn’t likely to run into anyone, anyway.
The plan was to keep it short. Maybe half an hour, forty minutes. I went out the back door and around the side to the gate. It felt good to be outside in the fresh air. There was a light breeze, but the night was still warm. I put in one earbud, set the volume low, and played The River, just loud enough for me to recognize each song and follow along in my head.
Walking down the driveway, I looked over my shoulder one more time. The light in Jen’s room was still off and the coast was clear.
As soon as I turned left onto the sidewalk, I felt the tension that had been building inside me since Saturday begin to lighten. The pain in my shoulder and neck eased. I’d been carrying more weight than I realized, and the small sense of freedom that came from venturing out into the night on my own surprised me.
I was careful, though, not to let my guard down. As relieved as I was to find my
earlier anxiety dissipating, I refused to let it go entirely. In fact, as I turned right onto Argonne, just as Springsteen was finding his way into “Jackson Cage,” I turned the music off and stowed the headphones in my pocket.
I had the streets to myself. No one was out and I’d only seen one car. The quiet stillness was relaxing. I heard crickets chirping, the leaves moving in the light breeze, and the distant, rhythmic hum of traffic blocks away rising and falling as I walked.
The calmness of the night made me feel awake and alert. And ready. If anyone came at me now, I thought, I’d be prepared. Part of me almost wished they would so we could finish things and I could get on with my life.
As I approached the small traffic roundabout at Vista I sensed something behind me. There was no need for subtlety. If anyone was back there I wanted to see them and for them to see me. As I turned, I caught some motion in my peripheral vision, but it was only a gray cat that stopped in its tracks as soon as I saw it. When I looked it in the eye, it crossed the street and kept walking.
My pulse had quickened, but I was reassured that my vigilance was at its peak.
I continued down Argonne and took another right on Broadway. The street was busier. A car would pass every minute or two, and I saw another pedestrian on the south side of the street. He seemed completely oblivious to me, his face lit by the glowing screen of his smartphone. I watched him over my shoulder as he passed and continued on.
It had been a little over fifteen minutes since I’d left Jen’s, so I turned north on Prospect to loop back home. The round-trip would be half an hour or so. A short walk, but a good one. It felt like I had actually put some tangible emotional distance between the present moment and the anxiety I had experienced earlier in the day. And the walk provided the added benefit of clearing away much of the fog that had been clouding my mind, and I felt optimistic about finally being able to sleep. After I turned the last corner back onto Colorado, I walked the last quarter of a mile and crossed the street toward Jen’s house on the other side.
Just as I stepped up onto the curb, I felt something hard and sharp strike the back of my head. I spun around and my right hand found the grip of my Glock hanging in its shoulder holster.
Jen was standing on the asphalt in the center of the illuminated circle shining down from the streetlight. She cocked her arm and threw another rock. Hard. It caught me square in the chest.
“Ow,” I said as the rock bounced to the grass at my feet.
She walked by me without saying a word or making eye contact.
I didn’t get much sleep after all.
“Even that damn cat could have offed you last night,” Jen said, glancing in the rearview mirror. She’d spent most of the morning ragging me and critiquing my lax situational awareness. “I wasn’t even trying to hide anymore by the time you got to Broadway and you still didn’t know I was there.”
“That’s the third time you’ve told me that,” I said.
“You’re not as badass as you think you are.”
I didn’t think I was badass at all. I never had, really. But for years, since Megan had died, I’d thought I didn’t really have anything to lose. There was a kind of freedom to be found in that. It wasn’t bravery or courage, really, just the lack of fear. That might not have been good for me as a person, but it was good for me as a cop. Now, as the wheels of self-justification kept turning in my head and I thought about loss and freedom, the lyrics to “Me and Bobby McGee” popped into my mind and I gave up on my attempted rationalization and imagined I was listening to Kris Kristofferson instead of my irate partner.
Jen parked across the street from Lucinda Denkins’s house. We weren’t sure if she would be home. She’d told me on the phone that she would be taking some time off from her job in the human resources department of the Long Beach Unified School District.
No one answered the knock on the door, so we walked over and looked up the driveway at the detached garage in back of the house. I had Bill Denkins’s address book in a manila envelope tucked under my arm. We’d made photocopies of every page and the book had been processed for evidence, but we didn’t find anything of potential use. I wanted to see how she’d react when I returned it to her. She’d indicated a personal attachment to it when we’d spoken on the phone, and I thought I might be able to get a stronger read on her. At that point, her grief had seemed honest and genuine. But I’d need a lot more than my instincts to clear her of suspicion. The more I could find out before I interrogated her, the better off the investigation would be.
“She’s not here,” Joe told us. He was wearing cargo shorts and a dirty T-shirt and he looked tired. There were half a dozen large cardboard boxes, filled mostly with books, scattered around him on the concrete floor. It looked as though he’d been digging through them. “We ran out of food,” he said. “I told her I’d go to the store, but she said she wanted to go. She needed to get out of the house.”
“How’s she doing?” Jen asked.
“Not very good,” he answered. “She’s trying to keep it together, but it’s hard. Her dad was a good guy.”
Jen nodded. “It takes time.”
“She wanted me to find some book out here that her dad gave her. Poetry. But she didn’t know the name or who wrote it.”
While Jen talked to him, I looked around the garage. I didn’t want him to notice me, but I did want to get a sense of the two of them, of their life. There were shelves along the back wall and a washer and dryer on the right. Things were neat, but not obsessively so. The trash cans were in one corner, the blue recycle bin’s lid held up a few inches by a garbage bag filled with empty water bottles and aluminum cans. Behind them were a bunch of gardening tools, shovels, rakes, and the like. Two bikes were leaning next to each other on their kickstands in the opposite corner. The one thing that stood out was a large framed poster leaning against a stack of boxes in the back. It had a black background with simple white block lettering that announced “WINTER IS COMING.” I knew it must have been a leftover from his failed restaurant. I recognized the catchphrase. Had he been trying to get a marketing bump from Game of Thrones?
“You still need to talk to us again, right?” Joe asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “For the formal interview. We’ll let you know when. The more we can put together beforehand, though, the quicker and easier it will be for you guys. We know how hard it is right now, and we want to make it as simple and straightforward as we can.”
“Thanks,” he said. “We appreciate it.” He tried to smile, but it didn’t quite work. There were a few gray hairs in the soul patch under his lip that I hadn’t noticed before.
“Good luck finding the book,” I said.
Jen and I walked back down the driveway. I still had the unopened envelope tucked under my arm.
In the car on the way back to the station, Jen said, “What do you think about Joe?”
“I’m not sure how to read him,” I said. “On the one hand, he seems to have the strongest motive, with the loan Bill made him for the restaurant. He flushed six figures down the toilet. And we still don’t know where the rest of the money came from. Was he into somebody else for it? Who? How much?” I drifted off into speculation.
When it was clear to her that I’d lost the thread, Jen said, “What about the other hand?”
She glanced away from the street ahead long enough to see the puzzled expression on my face. “You started that out with ‘On the one hand’ but you never got to the other hand.”
“Oh, yeah. Does he seem like he’s got enough spine to fake a suicide?”
She thought about it. “Not really, no.”
“But.”
“Desperation can really straighten up your posture.”
I’d sent Jen links to the Facebook and Yelp pages for Joe’s failed restaurant. I asked if she’d had a chance to look at them.
“Is it just me,” she said, “or is ‘Winter’ a really stupid name?”
“I thought the same thing.”
“Right? Why would Bill invest in something like that? Seems like he had pretty good business sense.”
“Maybe he was investing in Joe,” she said.
“That sounds like a worse bet than the restaurant.”
“Yeah, but maybe he did it for Lucinda.”
That made more sense to me. From the limited amount I knew about Bill, that seemed like a more credible theory.
“What about his ex?” she asked.
“Lucinda’s mother? She’s on my list to interview. Lives up in Pasadena, though, so I was waiting until it looked like we had half a day to spare.”
“You ready to talk to her?” Jen asked. “We go right now, we can probably beat the rush-hour traffic coming back.”
I considered it. My notes were in my jacket pocket, and I could access most of the files on my iPad while Jen drove. “Let’s do it.”
Celeste Gordon was waiting for us when we arrived. Normally, we like to drop in on potential witnesses unannounced. Often the surprise allows us to catch them off guard and they will reveal information that might not have been so forthcoming if they’d had time to prepare for our arrival. But we didn’t relish the idea of spending most of the afternoon on the freeway only to knock on an unanswered door. So we had called ahead and she had agreed to meet us at her home.
We had followed the Waze app’s directions on my phone, even though I was hesitant about taking the 110 through downtown LA, but the nav system was taking us around an accident on the more logical route that would have taken us up the Long Beach Freeway. We still hit some congestion, but we made the trip in an hour and fifteen minutes.
The exclusive neighborhood was tucked in between Cal Tech and the Huntington Library and Gardens, not far from the dividing line between Pasadena and its wealthier neighbor, San Marino. The houses were on big lots, set back from the street with privacy hedges or finely wrought fences crawling with ivy. Gordon lived in an expansive single-level ranch with a circular driveway and enough lush greenery to make it appear as though the California drought was considerate enough not to cross the San Marino city line.