A Checklist for Murder

by Anthony Flacco

  Hours later, just before noon, Warschaw stopped by the hospital to check on Natasha and learned that she had passed the crisis point but was still in the intensive care unit. He was pleased to receive permission to talk to her for a few minutes; the hours since the accident had only produced more mystery.

  Warschaw had been cautioned that she wasn’t responding to questions well. She was fading in and out, giving erratic statements. With his first glance he could tell that he wasn’t going to be able to press her at all. She lay semiconscious, pin-cushioned with lines fed by IV bags. The doctors were still assessing her head wounds and working to stabilize her condition before putting her under anesthesia and beginning to operate. Warschaw moved in close to her bedside and quietly introduced himself, but she seemed barely aware of his presence.

  Warschaw didn’t know if her condition was the result of medications or just the product of her severe head injuries. But with a possible homicide investigation developing, he had to learn anything he could. Especially if she didn’t make it through surgery. This was, he realized, probably the only person in the world who might tell him the truth about what had happened; whoever had inflicted the blows had plenty of cause to lie.

  Warschaw began his questions. He worked slowly and gently, but his interview subject faded in and out of consciousness as he tried to coax her forward. The quality of most of her responses was hardly better than the fragmented monologue that Paramedic Clyde Piephoff had heard from her as he and his crew loaded her into the ambulance.

  But gradually, one tiny step after another, she managed to give out one or two meaningful words at a time through her broken teeth until a rough story came out in bits and pieces. Natasha gave the last name of her companion Patty, but wasn’t sure of the spelling. She recalled dimly that they had left Patty’s house on the day the crimes began, estimating at about 7:30 or 8:00 P.M. when they went to Natasha’s house. She said that they then left Natasha’s at about 10:30 P.M. and went to meet “some guys.”

  She murmured that this was the last thing she could remember before waking up at the hospital.

  Warschaw wasn’t sure if Natasha meant that she and Patty had intended to meet some guys or if they already had met them, but he had seen many victims of head injuries. No one had to tell him that severe blows to the head can scramble memories, thoughts, perceptions. The young woman seemed to be giving her best recollection of the night before, but she clearly wasn’t going to be of much help for now. Mark Warschaw didn’t know who this Patty person might be, but he knew that the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office had already identified the dead woman as Natasha’s mother.

  At that point the X rays came back from the lab, showing multiple skull fractures. There was no time to question her further; interview subject Natasha Peernock was going to have to face surgery right away to avoid possible brain hemorrhage.

  With nothing else left to do, Mark Warschaw silently wished her luck and left her side for the last time. He had, as always, a long list of accidents in need of investigation.

  “Patty, I’m telling you, the police found them together. This morning at about four o’clock. It was some kind of terrible wreck. Claire died instantly.”

  Patty turned slowly toward the empty Peernock house. She looked in that direction for a long moment. “Something’s wrong about all this.”

  “I know there is,” Danielle replied. “But you can’t go near that house again. Promise me you’ll stay away from there. I mean it!”

  “Okay. Okay, I’ll stay away. Listen, what did Mr. Peernock say about this? I know he was there last night.”

  “That’s why you have to stay away from the house.”

  “What do you mean?”

  There was a pause. Patricia felt the dread seeping into her, but she still had no way of knowing that it was the same feeling of dread Natasha had tried to beam out to her from captivity hours before.

  Patty asked again. “What do you mean that’s why I have to stay away?”

  “It’s because of him …. They haven’t found him yet.”

  • • •

  It was about two hours later, at 10:00 A.M. on the morning of the crimes. Over on the other side of the Hollywood Hills, Claire’s boss, Tina Nussbaum, had become concerned about Claire’s absence from work. Claire was never late without calling, but no one at the office had heard anything from her. Tina called Claire’s number and was surprised when an answering machine picked up. There was a man’s voice on it.

  The recording puzzled her. Claire had recently remarked to Tina that she disliked the whole idea of answering machines in a person’s home. She said she would never have one. Only three weeks before, when Tina had last had occasion to call Claire at home, there had been no machine. Now Tina was being mechanically greeted by a man who didn’t even live there. Tina knew Claire lived apart from her husband and that they were not on good terms. She couldn’t picture Claire asking her husband to install an answering machine in her house and then put his voice on it.

  She mentally reviewed the intimacies Claire had confided to her about her family life. She recalled Claire talking about Robert being upset because he didn’t like the young man Natasha was dating. It seemed that he didn’t like Natasha’s friends. In Claire’s opinion, he didn’t appear to like Natasha herself, and he kept as much distance from her as from Claire.

  Tina recalled that Claire had been deeply anxious to proceed with their divorce.

  For all these reasons, she sensed that something was dangerously wrong about the situation at the Peernock home. She asked one of her other employees to call the police and ask them to check out her suspicions.

  Claire had expressed concerns about Robert’s tendency toward violence too many times for Tina to be able to shrug off her failure to report for work.

  CHAPTER

  8

  At the same moment that Tina Nussbaum was making her call to Claire’s house and listening with consternation to Robert Peernock’s voice on the answering machine, Robert Peernock himself was not a happy man.

  He had just left Foothill Savings and Loan, where he had tried to cash out his account for its full amount of $51,929.09. However, they kept little cash on hand as a matter of policy at Foothill. Instead, the manager issued Peernock a voucher slip for the nearby Bank of America, where Foothill Savings had an arrangement for their customers to obtain cash.

  But when he took the receipt to the Bank of America branch, their shipment of cash hadn’t arrived yet for the day’s business. Despite Peernock’s firm objections, the branch manager informed Robert that there was nothing else to be done. They did not have enough cash yet that day to cover a note for nearly $52,000.

  Instead the manager gave Peernock $9,000, which was practically all the currency that the branch had on hand. He informed Peernock that he would have to deposit the rest of the voucher in a savings account there at Bank of America and return on the following day after the bank had the chance to get ready for such a large cash withdrawal. The only other choice the branch could offer was a cashier’s check for the balance of nearly $43,000, so that Peernock could take this registered and traceable document to some other financial institution and cash it there.

  Peernock decided just to take the $9,000 at that moment and return for the balance, in cash, the following day.

  He called Sonia Siegel from the bank shortly afterward to tell her where he was. Sonia tried to swallow her concerns about why he had stayed out all night. Instead she just reminded him that they had an appointment with a plumber at her place at noon; Robert had said he wanted to be there. He assured her that he would be home in time to meet the plumber, and hung up.

  Whatever Sonia’s instincts may have been telling her at that point, she later recalled that Robert never mentioned a thing about a car wreck, an injured daughter, or a dead wife.

  Although Robert Peernock has said that he “announced” his separation from Claire sometime in 1982, five years before her death, he continued to live in the
same house with her until late 1983 or early 1984. At the time he met Sonia he was about forty-six, robust in stature and vain enough about his appearance to keep his hair permed in tight curls and his weak chin concealed by a virile-looking seaman’s beard. His intense personality and piercing eyes captured Soma’s interest as soon as they met.

  Sonia was barely forty years old, but looked and acted younger. Her pretty face was framed by thick, dark tresses and her breathy voice conveyed images of femininity and vulnerability that have always had universal appeal to the sort of men who like to feel that they are stronger than the women in their lives.

  Whether Robert was actually stronger than Sonia or not, he came along at a time when she was single again and nearly finished with rearing her children from a prior marriage. She owned her own condo in a nice area of town and had financial means to live without being employed full-time.

  For Sonia, surely the prospect of a new relationship with an attractive, dynamic man who had “announced” his separation from his wife and who was looking to move out of his marital home had a strong appeal. The two began to see each other regularly. It couldn’t have hurt Soma’s opinion of the relationship’s potential to know that Robert also owned half of his family’s house plus three other investment properties plus a large bank account stuffed with cash. Many women in Los Angeles would consider such a man a catch; pretty Sonia Siegel was the one who caught him.

  She invited Robert to move in with her and soon became utterly devoted to him. Sonia describes herself as having been very much in love with Robert. She considered the relationship one where both partners planned to spend their lives together. She tells no tales of emotional abuse at Robert’s hands. She makes no complaints that he beat her or her children or that he ever caused her to fear for their safety.

  In fact, only a few weeks earlier her teenage son had accompanied Tasha to her senior prom, leaving Tasha to marvel afterward that the young man described Robert as being a loving father figure. Tasha has no explanation for the young man’s point of view; it is always hard to accept a description of someone when it is radically different from your own. But she remembers being thirteen years old and assuring everyone at the hospital that her arm was shattered as the result of taking a bad fall after slipping on a sock. At the time she knew better than to tell a story about her father that she would later have to live with, once she was back home with him. Alone.

  Whatever actually took place in the privacy of Robert and Sonia’s home lives, they remained together under her roof for nearly four years. Whenever he could, Robert kept his youngest daughter with him there. If the girl had to be back at Claire’s house to attend school and if she wanted Robert to be there with her, Sonia knew that Robert would stay the night at Claire’s house but sleep in Claire’s bed alone. On those nights Claire slept in her daughter’s room.

  Sonia was aware that although Claire was also a very attractive woman, if Claire had a sex life anymore it wasn’t with Robert. It hadn’t been for a long time.

  In fact, Sonia can’t recall a single instance when Robert spent the night at his wife’s house from the time he moved in with Sonia, except for those few times that he stayed over just to be with his little girl.

  So it had come as a real surprise to Sonia when she received the phone call from Robert just after the previous midnight, telling her that he was still at Claire’s house.

  It was even stranger when the night passed without Robert showing up back at her place. It was stranger still when the plumber arrived shortly after noon that day and had to start the work without Robert’s presence. The plumber was still working when the phone rang again, but when Sonia answered she learned that it wasn’t Robert calling to assure her that he was on the way.

  It was Detective Arthur Castro from the Foothill police station, looking for Robert. Sonia told him Robert wasn’t there and asked what the problem was. Castro asked her to have Robert call him as soon as possible. He told Sonia that there had been an automobile accident involving Robert’s daughter, Natasha, and Robert’s Cadillac. Nothing was said about Claire, but Sonia thought back to Robert’s call from Claire’s house at midnight and asked if Claire had been involved. He told her that there had been another, unidentified female involved in the situation but to just please have Robert call the station right away.

  For the rest of the day Sonia made frantic phone calls to Claire’s house, leaving message after message for Robert on the phone machine that Claire had insisted she would never want in her home, the same machine Robert had just recently installed in his youngest daughter’s bedroom.

  It was nearly six that evening before Robert returned to Sonia’s place and got the news about Natasha being in the hospital. He expressed shock, but he didn’t call the police as they had requested. He said that he refused to talk to the authorities until he could get to the hospital to check on his daughter.

  The trip to the hospital would be about a thirty-minute drive. He came back a couple of hours later, telling Sonia that he had attempted to see Natasha but the hospital wasn’t allowing any visitors. He claimed to have walked around the hospital trying to think up an alternate plan, but that after a while he decided to give up and returned to Sonia’s.

  Sonia couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  “What do you mean they won’t let you see her?” she challenged him. “She’s your daughter! And you don’t even know how badly she’s hurt. You go back there right now, tell them you’re her father and you aren’t going to leave until they take you to her!”

  Robert wasn’t going to get any peace until he did as she insisted, so he left for a second time.

  He finally returned after ten. “Okay,” he told her, “I got to her this time. But she couldn’t talk to me.”

  Then he gave her the shocking news. “She’s in a coma. Her head’s all wrapped in bandages. The nurse says there’s a good chance that there’ll be brain damage.”

  Sonia sympathized, but she was glad that at least Robert had done the right thing in asserting himself to the hospital staff and demanding his father’s right to see his terribly injured daughter, especially since Robert had made it plain that Natasha had terrible head wounds. He said he knew that for a fact. To Sonia it was incomprehensible, a hospital telling a father he couldn’t see his own daughter after such a trauma.

  What possible reason could they have had for such inhumane behavior?

  Sonia went to bed that night burdened by the horrible image of Robert’s eldest daughter as he had described seeing her in the hospital upon his second visit that evening, with her head wrapped in bandages, deep in a coma, suffering terrible brain damage. Perhaps even the loss of all her memory.

  Tasha lay in her room with her eyes wide open, trying not to move her head as the waves of pain swept through her. The doctors avoided giving her any medication except mild pain relievers. Heavy painkillers were still too dangerous to use, given the need to assess her level of consciousness and determine whether she would have postsurgery complications. She could only lie quietly, trying not to move or even roll her head from side to side. There were no bandages to protect her freshly sutured wounds from contact with the sheets; the jagged rips had to be left open to the air for maximum healing.

  Tasha tried to get the message across to every nurse and doctor who entered her room that she needed protection outside her door. But medical staffers know that head injury patients often display signs of inappropriate concern and heightened emotion. There is no way to cater to all the irrational demands such patients can make.

  And so the stabs of throbbing pain battled with Tasha’s fears for domination of her thoughts, while she struggled to remember every detail of her last night in the family home. She tried to bring up a clear picture of Claire and to think what might have happened to her mother. But she just didn’t know yet—at least she didn’t know up in the front of her mind where images are clear and where words can be formed to express them.

  But she knew. Deep d
own, way back in the shadows, she knew in those places where dreams and nightmares come from, where memories of the past and hopes for the future and fears about all kinds of dangerous things all mingle together.

  She knew down in the part of her memory where she was still a little girl wandering alone and lost, stranded among overpowering primal forces, trembling at the warnings that ricocheted inside her while she strained to hear the sources of deadly sounds circling ever closer.

  She knew down there where she stored impressions of a tiny child trapped in a life of violence that could spring unexpectedly out of any situation, no matter how harmless things might seem on the surface.

  She knew what had happened to her mother with that same part of her that had been born almost as soon as Tasha was born, the protective part that kept her true self back in the shadows, blanketing her feelings, hiding her intentions. That part of her understood with instinctive clarity that the scent of fear or the stab of memory could lure more of the badness down upon her.

  This old inner protector had been activated the night before, with the first biting grip of her father’s fingers in the flesh of her throat. It had completely taken over her memory with the first blow of cold steel. Even now, when she was alone in the hospital, it would not release full memory to her and would not show her the depth of her fears. Her old inner protector still detected danger close by, lurking unseen.

  Was it a troubled sleep for Robert John Peernock at Sonia’s condo that night? He had been awake all the previous night and all that day. Depending on whose story you believe, he had either been working nervously in the backyard on his spray-painting project while fretting about why on earth his wife and daughter would steal his pride-and-joy Cadillac to go careening through the boondocks on a drunken wild ride (even though the two women never partied together and Claire had never been seen drinking by longtime friends or co-workers, and despite the fact that she was known to hate driving at night because of her eyes), or else he’d been up all night busily torturing his wife and daughter and setting up their murder in a flaming car wreck using his pyrotechnic expertise with demonic skill and then hurriedly hiding the evidence and cleaning up the house during the wee hours while waiting for the bank doors to open later that morning.