by Paul Heald
“Come in!” The detective’s voice cut through the frosted glass door like an industrial diamond. “Ah, Professor, you just missed your partner. We had a very nice conversation just a few moments ago.”
“What about?”
“Oh, this and that. What can I do for you?” He looked at his watch and pulled his briefcase out from underneath his desk. He packed it with papers while Stanley spoke.
“Like I told you on the phone, I’d like to look at the surveillance recording this evening.”
“Why the hurry?”
Stanley hesitated. “I found Miriam Wilhoit. That’s where I was this afternoon. She had some interesting things to say. I need to look at the surveillance recording again to check out her story.”
“You found the secretary? You know,” he conceded with an odd smile as he snapped his briefcase shut, no longer in a hurry to leave his office, “you’re really getting pretty good at this.” He took out a pen and clicked it. “Where is she? She’s currently wanted for questioning in an arson investigation.”
“I promised her that I wouldn’t tell the police.”
“You told her what?”
“Settle down, McCaffrey. I told her that I wouldn’t tell you. I didn’t promise her that I wouldn’t tell Don. Given what I’ve learned about her, I’m sure he’ll be happy to rat her out once I’ve talked to him.” He felt no compunction using a promissory technicality to bring in the former secretary, admitted embezzler, and probable arsonist. It would also give Don a chance to score some points with the police.
The detective still looked unhappy. “You’ll have to wait a while to talk to him. He’s not taking visitors right now.” He paused before dropping his bombshell for the second time in an hour. “He’s going to be pleading guilty the day after tomorrow, and I think he wants some quiet time to contemplate his sins.”
Stanley stared at McCaffrey contemptuously, remembering how the gaps in his friend’s memory had undermined his confidence in his own innocence. The thought of the detective taking advantage was repugnant, but the best way to deal with him and his self-satisfied revelation was to ignore it. “When can I see the recording?”
“No comment on the news?” He leaned back in his chair with an expression that momentarily could have been taken for respect. “It seems to me like you’re out of a job.”
“Has he formally revoked my status as his investigator?”
“No,” the detective admitted, “I don’t think that he did.”
“Then when can I see the recordings?”
A pause. A shrug of the shoulders. “Right now if you want.” He stood up and grabbed his briefcase. “Follow me.”
The two men walked down a narrow corridor to a cluttered room containing several aging computers and other electronic equipment, including a color television on a black cart. McCaffrey pulled three DVD’s out of a filing cabinet. “Here’s copies of the surveillance from noon to six p.m., six p.m. to midnight, and midnight to six a.m. I’ll tell the sergeant that you’re down here and might be staying awhile.” He slapped the thin plastic boxes into the stomach of his adversary and headed out the door. “And if he offers you any coffee, don’t take it, unless you’ve got a taste for squirrel diarrhea.”
Stanley sat down and popped the first DVD into the machine. It was supper time and he should have been hungry, but his desire to view the recordings was stronger than his appetite. He felt a renewed sense of urgency. He needed to come up with something soon or Don would seal his own fate in less than forty-eight hours.
The first black and white recording began with Don giving a file to Miriam and then leaving the building for the day. Little happened for the next ten minutes, and he looked for a remote control to fast forward through stretches of inactivity. He pushed the pause button on the DVD player itself and engaged in a fruitless search around the room, giving up only after checking every desk and file drawer. He finally resigned himself to sitting close to the cart and manually working the buttons on the face of the machine.
The first two hours revealed a steady trickle of characters wandering in and out of the building. He took a pen out of his pocket and jotted down descriptions: long hair with dark miniskirt; double-breasted suit with sunglasses; light hair with light pants, which he later crossed out as each flagged person left.
He paused at the halfway point on the first DVD and rubbed his eyes. No sign of anyone remotely resembling Chance Geary had entered Eden Studio by 3:00 p.m. on the afternoon of the murder. He started the recording again and refocused. Just as his stomach started to rumble, he saw a familiar face pass across the screen. Dark sweater and dark pants, he wrote on the paper. He stared at the screen in rapt attention for the next three hours of elapsed time, hardly fast-forwarding at all. The dark sweater and pants had gone in, but had not come out. He rewound the recording back to the precise moment when the suspect entered and cued it up, ready to show McCaffrey. It was almost one o’clock in the morning, and he doubted that he would sleep at all that night. The race was on.
* * *
Angela arrived at the hotel feeling nauseous after a long ride from the airport in a rental car reeking of stale cigarette smoke. It was well after supper, but she had no desire to go out, so she ordered a club sandwich and a salad from room service and sat down in front of the television.
The surveillance of her husband would start at midnight, when she would place a call to his room. She did not want to talk to him, so if he answered, she was going to hang up. The point was to learn something about his nocturnal activities. Then, she would get up early, find a good observation point and see when, if at all, he emerged from his room. The hotel had only one exit, so he would have to pass through the lobby on the way out. If he did not come down by 10:00 a.m., she would check his room. If he was not there, it would be time to hit the warpath.
After she finished the meal, she watched a movie until 12:30 a.m. and when it was over she turned the television off and took a deep breath. Please let him be there, she whispered, but her little prayer, like her telephone call to Stanley’s room, went unanswered. She flopped down hard on the bed and fought back a sob, making mental excuses for his late night, concocting innocent scenarios that had delayed his return to the hotel. Her proposed morning surveillance took on increasingly high stakes. If he did not show up, it would be impossible to believe any stories he could offer for not having spent the night in his room.
* * *
Stanley slept better than he anticipated and left an early morning message on McCaffrey’s answering machine explaining that he would be coming to the police station to show him something interesting on the surveillance recording. He felt that the case had been cracked wide open, and whether he roused the detective’s anger or somehow earned his grudging admiration, he was looking forward to the meeting. By 7:30 a.m., he was showered and ready to take on rush hour traffic. He grabbed a donut from the breakfast nook next to the hotel lobby and strode out of the building with no idea that his wife was sitting in the far corner, peering at him over a copy of the newspaper. Nor did he notice the boxy rental car that followed him all the way to police station.
“Well, if it isn’t Inspector Clouseau,” the detective said when Stanley walked into his office. “What is it you want to show me today? Got more purple fuzzies?”
“Better than that,” he replied with a grin. “I’m going to show you the sweater itself.” He motioned for McCaffrey to stand up and follow, “Come on. Let’s take a look at the surveillance recording.”
As the detective trailed him down the hall, he explained his methodology of keeping track of those who entered and left the building. “I was looking for someone who was recorded entering, but not leaving. Such a person could have hid in Don’s office, killed Jade while he was passed out, and left through the back window.” He turned on the television and DVD player and immediately hit the pause button. “Imagine my surprise when someone arrives wearing a dark sweater, but never leaves.” He started the recording
. “You can check it for yourself, but the person you’re about to see is never seen leaving the building.”
McCaffrey studied the image carefully and then asked Stanley to rewind it. “Let me see it one more time.” He shook his head as he studied the figure moving through the lobby. “I give up. Who is it?”
“Susan Jenkins, also known as Sheila Easy during her days as a porn star.”
“The chick that Janet Stephens is pushing on me.” For once, McCaffrey was taking him seriously. He sat down in a creaky wooden chair in the small media room.
“The very same.”
The detective steepled his fingers together and thought for a moment before speaking. “I suppose you’d like me to get a warrant to search her closet.”
“You’re a mind reader.”
He thought for a moment more, and when he spoke, his negativity, for once, did not seem to come from spitefulness. “But what am I gonna to tell the judge? If this were a color recording, there might be a chance of getting a warrant. But all we’ve got here is a woman in a dark sweater—it could be gray or blue for all we know—who comes into the building and doesn’t leave. I’ve been in that building; there are other exits she might have used.”
“Only one that doesn’t set off a fire alarm.” He explained Janet’s smoker’s hideaway.
“Without connecting her to the crime in some other way, I don’t have nearly enough to go asking for a warrant.”
“Are you serious?” Stanley shook his head in disbelief.
“Very serious.” He stood up to leave. “Look, you’ve done good work here. When I first met you, I thought you were a total fuck up, but this is nice.” He motioned to the television. “So was finding Miriam Wilhoit and William Walker. But I’m not going to waste my time asking for a warrant that stands no chance of being issued.” He turned around just before he left and gave Stanley a salacious smile. “Maybe you could make friends with Jenkins and get a peek at her boudoir?”
* * *
Angela followed her husband into the jail parking garage and waited in a shadowed space several slots away until he returned. After listening to thirty minutes of news on a public radio station, she saw him walk rapidly to back to his car. He got in, but did not drive off immediately. Instead, he talked on his cell phone for almost fifteen minutes before she finally saw the flash of his brake lights as he backed out of the parking space.
Once on the highway, it was not hard to follow him. Traffic was relatively light, and he had always been a conservative driver, staying mostly in the far right hand lane unless the person in front of him was going at a crawl. He drove north from downtown Los Angeles and eventually exited onto a broad boulevard leading to an attractive neighborhood of Mission-style houses and upscale condominiums.
He eventually stopped in front of a beautiful gated condo community, got out of his car and pushed one of several buttons on a panel next to an ornate wrought iron gate. A minute later, an attractive woman came out and spoke to him through the bars of the gate. Angela had no trouble identifying Janet Stephens. She got a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach when her rival finally opened the gate, gave her husband an enthusiastic hug, and led him back to her home. Angela lowered her head to the steering wheel and concluded that following him around was the stupidest thing she had ever done. Nothing good can come of this, she thought as she slumped back in the seat.
* * *
Stuart McCaffrey slowly walked the six blocks to the skyscraper where the city’s forensic pathologists had their labs and offices. Thirty years on the police force had worked two significant and perversely related changes in the aging detective. His instincts had become stronger over the years; the ability to sniff out lies had sharpened. Yet, at the same time, he cared less and less about whether the criminal justice system got things exactly right. Susan Jenkins, aka Sheila Easy, smelled bad to him. On paper, she was just another suspect. The evidence pointed less toward her than to Don Johansson, Chance Geary, or Janet Stephens, but something about the anti-porn zealot made his nose wrinkle. Did this mean that Johansson might be innocent? Maybe. He would not be the first innocent person to plead guilty to avoid the more serious consequences of going to trial and losing. The detective had ceased dwelling on this sort of injustice long ago, and the hardness made being a cop easier. But he had come to understand that the same hardness had made him impossible to live with as a husband, so he walked across downtown Los Angeles, pensively and purposefully, to talk with his ex-wife.
“Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” The offer prompted Ellen McCaffrey to look up from her computer over her reading glasses. She had never been a traditionally beautiful woman, but her ex-husband liked the way she kept her thick, graying hair cut full around head. Genes from her English mother had helped her face maintain the complexion of a much younger woman, and he wished in vain to see it break into a smile.
“Sorry, I’m totally swamped right now.” She looked back at her computer, keeping her hands on the keyboard.
“Can I sit down? I want to talk about the Delilah case for a minute.”
After a few more keystrokes, she pushed back from her work station and faced him. “Alright . . . you’ve seen the reports, haven’t you?”
“Yeah, but I need your intuition right now more than I need forensic science.” He patted the folder he held in his hand and sat down in the chair opposite her desk. “You’ve worked on dozens of murders over the years.”
“Hundreds.”
“Right.” He took a deep breath. “What I want you to do is sit back and imagine the killer. Tell me about the perpetrator. You’ve always been good at studying a victim and making guesses about the killer. What’s your sense in this case?”
He offered her the file, but she shook her head. “The first blow, struck while she was standing, would have knocked her unconscious and disfigured her for life, maybe even killed her. She was then struck viciously several more times while she lay on the floor unable to defend herself.” She closed her eyes and tried to imagine the scene. “This was more than murder. It was an act of destruction. It was an act of hatred and loathing.”
“Have you met Don Johansson?”
“No, but I’ve seen clips of him on television,” she replied. “You probably saw the rerun of him on Leno, too.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s hard to see him that angry.”
“Maybe,” he conceded, “but over the years we’ve both seen jealousy and frustration turn people into animals.” She nodded and for a moment he felt they might be on the same page.
“Lemme tell you why I’m here.” He explained Susan Jenkins’s axe to grind with the porn industry and revealed her prevarication about what television show she had been watching on the night of the murder.
Ellen seemed unimpressed until he described the image of the anti-porn crusader captured by the surveillance camera wearing a dark sweater. She was well aware of the fabric fibers found on the window sill in the office. “So, you think she might have done it?”
“I don’t think anything right now, but I do know that I’ve got a guy ready to plead guilty to the crime.”
“Johansson?”
“Who else?” He looked into her eyes and tried to read her reaction. She didn’t blink. She was as sanguine as he about the realities of plea bargaining.
“You know,” she responded after a moment’s thought, “Johansson’s not the only person I’ve seen on television. I saw an interview with Susan Jenkins on Lifetime a couple of months ago.”
“You watch Lifetime?”
She ignored him and continued. “She struck me as being an extremely angry and vindictive woman. Of course, given the stories that she told, I could hardly blame her. But even as a victim, she had a distinctly unappealing quality about her.” She tried to remember more details of the show. “I’m not sure that I know how to explain it.”
“Can you see her as Jade’s killer?”
“Possibly. She comes off as being a much angrier pers
on than Johansson. I mean, he was really relaxed and funny on Leno. He made me like him despite his profession.” She paused again. “It’s all just intuition, of course. What I’d rather do is analyze fibers from the sweaters that she has in her closet.”
“Me too.” He knew that she understood the problem of legally obtaining samples. “But there’s not enough here for a warrant.”
She erupted into a humorless laugh. “You’ve never let rules stop you before.”
At first he thought that she was going to chide him again for his ethical lapses, but instead she studied the Los Angeles cityscape from her window for a minute before finally turning back around and uttering a huge sigh. “I can’t believe I’m asking you this, but how hard would it be for you to get into her house and get some fiber samples?”
He stared at her in disbelief and slowly managed a response. “Unless she’s got a really sophisticated alarm system, not very hard.”
“Then do it,” she said with finality. “Pay her closet a little visit.”
“What happened to respecting the law, Ellie?” He waved his right hand in a gesture of acquiescence. “Not that I’m complaining, but our marriage busted up over my request that you forget some evidence rules. Why the change of heart?” He thought he had her, but as usual, she outmaneuvered him.
“Back then, you wanted me to frame someone, jerk face. Now, I’m suggesting you do something that might get an innocent person off the hook. It’s not quite the same thing.” She leaned back in her chair. “I’ve never been sure about Johansson.”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “Your tox report is one reason we can’t really ask for the death penalty.” When he saw no apology on her face, a sneaky idea entered his head.
“Okay, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll go over to Susan Jenkins’ house, do a quick rummage in her closet and deliver the fibers to you. They’ll be inadmissible against her, of course, but if they match the sample found on the window sill, we won’t push things with Johansson.” He gave her his most winning smile, one that looked more crooked and sardonic than sincere. “But,” he emphasized, “you have to go out to dinner with me no matter what the fiber samples show.” It was her turn to look surprised. “Baby, if I’m gonna break the rules for you, I should get something out of it.”