A Checklist for Murder

by Anthony Flacco

  People queue up early to get the good seats. Thus Robert Peernock, alias “James Dobbs,” did not need to fear recognition from others in the crowd. Eyes generally remain fixed onstage throughout the show’s seven acts; Peernock/Dobbs remained anonymous in the dark, but outside the bright city lay waiting.

  He was, after all, a brand-new bachelor in Las Vegas, Nevada. He had a suitcase stuffed with cash and plenty of time to kill. The brightly lighted, flashing and winking, feather-fannied, silicon-stuffed town spread itself out before him.

  It offered absolutely no resistance at all.

  CHAPTER

  10

  Tasha awoke with a jolt in the hospital bed. This time the nightmare was the kind that ended when she opened her eyes. The face staring down at her was not her father’s but that of her friend Patricia, who had returned to the room to be with her and to stay as long as it would take.

  “We’re lucky they let me in here, Tash,” Patty whispered. “You’re not supposed to have visitors this late.”

  Tasha tried to think of the usual kind of sarcastic, joking reply in the spirit of conversations she and Patty used to have. She couldn’t form the words. She tried simply to smile, but her lips wouldn’t spread far enough.

  So she just nodded slightly. Patty took that in, then nodded along with her and giggled, glancing back at the door as if they were two conspirators who had just put one over on the hospital system.

  The invisible lines between them began to crackle as the energy of their friendship danced back and forth.

  “Whoa. You look like the Elephant Man,” Patty teased, forcing a little laugh. But Tasha didn’t smile at that one, either, so Patty dropped it.

  “Patty,” Tasha whispered, taking Patty’s arm and squeezing it weakly, “… where’s my mom?’

  Patty froze at the question. The nurses had made it plain to her that before they would give her full-time visiting privileges, Patty had to agree to play ball with them about how to handle that question. Patty was nineteen years old and had never had to tell someone that a family member had been murdered. And now her friend Tasha was looking up at her strangely, as if trying to read Patty’s silence.

  Finally Tasha added, “I keep asking them but they give me the same stuff … like ‘You can see her later.’ And I’m all, ‘Yeah, but how is she?’ … And they just keep saying … ‘You have to see her later.’”

  Patty knew that Tasha wasn’t the type who trusted a lot of people; she made friends slowly. And even though Patty was by far the more gregarious, each valued the fact that she could absolutely believe what the other said to her. Absolutely.

  “Well, Tash …” She hesitated. The pause grew longer.

  And she knew right then that she couldn’t tell. The nurses had warned her that Tasha’s mental state was so fragile right now that the news of her mother’s death might push her over the edge. They warned that if she didn’t help them protect Natasha from the truth until she was strong enough to handle it, Patty could wind up being responsible for her friend’s failure to recover.

  That thought scared the hell out of her. Both girls had some measure of experience with lies of convenience, told to teachers to excuse late homework or to parents to get them off your back. This was Patty’s first encounter with a lie of mercy.

  “She’s … in a room just down the hall, Tash. You can see her later on. I mean, she has to rest for a while. Hey”—Patty touched Tasha’s arms again, wondering where else she could touch her that wouldn’t hurt—“come on. Give it some time. You guys were both pretty badly torn up.”

  Tasha thought about it for a moment, staring into Patty’s eyes. Finally she nodded. That little smile started moving through her lips again. And even though her lips were swollen to several times their normal size, this time the smile almost felt okay.

  • • •

  At 1:45 in the morning on the twenty-fourth, less than forty-six hours after the wreck was first discovered, Judge Michael Luros of the San Fernando Superior Court was awake and working. He signed the search warrant for Claire’s house and another for Soma’s condo.

  By 4:00 A.M., forty-eight hours after the report of the wreck, teams of detectives were at both locations looking for anything that might provide solid evidence of just what had taken place at the Peernock residence two nights before. Fisk and Castro led the search at the Peernock house. The first part was easy; check for the items on the warrant. Look for obvious things: a bloody shoe, a weapon of some kind.

  But Fisk soon realized that more warrants would be needed, more trips would soon be made back to the Peernock house. Because even though Peernock hadn’t lived there in years, he still kept an office area jammed with files and stacks of papers. Any part of it could offer clues. Any scrap could point to answers. Fisk realized with dismay that he was looking at dozens, perhaps hundreds of hours spent sifting. And in a society growing more violent every day, time is a homicide cop’s most expensive luxury, the least available commodity that he has. Therefore, even as important as these paper searches might prove to be, they were likely to have to take a backseat.

  For the moment Fisk needed hard evidence of exactly what could have happened to a mother and daughter whose injuries were identical, save for the fact that the daughter survived because she was able to thrash her head from side to side, just enough to protect her skull from the fatal fractures that took her mother’s life.

  At 8:45 A.M. on July 24, the autopsy of Claire Peernock began. Steve Fisk attended personally. If anything should be discovered that might help bring about the apprehension of the suspect, and thereby assure the survival of Natasha Peernock, he wasn’t about to sit around waiting for a phone call to find out.

  The result came quickly and the findings were conclusive. Death had occurred as a result of blows from a blunt instrument wielded with great force. A fist-sized bruise had been inflicted on the left side of her face at some time prior to death. A smaller bruise was on the right wrist, judged to be a defensive wound suffered either in pulling against wrist restraints or reflexively shielding her face from the blows that had killed her.

  A murder warrant was issued on Robert John Peernock.

  Later on in the morning of July 24, “James Dobbs” mailed a letter from Las Vegas to Foothill Savings in Los Angeles. He wrote under the name of Robert Peernock, acting under instructions he had obtained from the bank during a phone call earlier that same day. He ordered the three Peernock accounts there to be closed, two of which were trusts for his children. The three new accounts were opened with Sonia Siegel’s name added to them, giving her access to his money there and allowing her to write checks on his behalf as well as to bring in deposits of any rent receipts she might collect for him from his income properties.

  At this point Sonia knew nothing of Peernock’s efforts on her behalf regarding his cash flow; she didn’t find out until the bank told her some days later. At this point all she knew was that the man in her life had gone to the hospital to see his injured eighteen-year-old daughter the morning before and had never returned. His eleven-year-old daughter remained with her and by now was asking questions that Sonia had no idea how to answer. By the time that the Department of Social Services took custody of the girl and drove off with her later in the day, the Old Sinking Feeling was no doubt getting hard for Sonia to ignore.

  • • •

  “Where were you?” Tasha murmured when Patty walked back in the room. “I woke up and there was nobody here.”

  “Oh, some nurse came in a while ago and lost her mind because I was sleeping on the floor by your bed. So I walked down to the gift shop to get out of her way.”

  “Like that?” She looked at Patricia, standing there in pajamas and slippers, no makeup, hair all stringy. In for the duration. Tasha laughed weakly, trying not to open her mouth so far as to draw in air over her sensitive, broken teeth.

  “So?” Patty replied breezily. “It’s not like they never see anybody in pajamas around here. Besides, at least I
’m not walking around in one of their stupid gowns with my butt hanging out the back.”

  “Maybe you should try it,” Tasha said with that odd expression that Patty had realized was the closest she could come to a smile right now. “I hear it’s a good way to meet guys.”

  Patty laughed at that. Tasha couldn’t join in with her, but her eyes locked onto Patty’s and Tasha could feel the laughter almost as if it were her own. It lifted the dark gray cloud off her heart for a few seconds.

  In that brief moment of strength, Tasha considered telling Patricia that she had realized her mother must be dead. There was no more reason to cover it up. After all, she had barely survived, but was still being allowed visits from a friend, so why wouldn’t she be able to see her own mother—if Claire were alive too? It made no sense. The you can-see-her-later line rang hollow.

  There was no other conclusion left. Robert had gotten her mother. Tasha almost spoke up, but she swallowed the impulse. She decided it would be better just to leave it alone.

  The gray cloud hanging over her thickened. It wrapped around her like a wet wool blanket, squeezing out all the light.

  On July 25, 1987, the Los Angeles Times used fourteen inches of type to reveal that the autopsy had been conclusive—the cause of Claire Peernock’s death was homicide—and that detectives believed that whoever arranged the crash had tried to make it look as if Claire had been drinking and had wrecked the car. The police established that Claire Peernock had been known to dislike driving on the freeway at night and that no one close to her could find a reason for her to be in a remote section of town at that hour.

  Police Lieutenant Bernard Conine explained that the car had been rigged to explode, but that the clumsy explosive apparatus had failed. He also revealed that the dead woman’s estranged husband, an expert pyrotechnic engineer, was the prime suspect in the crime and was being sought for questioning.

  Victoria Doom, Claire’s former divorce attorney, saw the article. The headline read MURDER PLOT SUSPECTED IN FATAL CRASH IN SUN VALLEY. But she only glanced at it, so she never spotted the name of the victim, a woman she had met once, seven and a half months before. Three more days would pass before the attorney began her journey of self-doubt about the advice she had given Claire back in December.

  At 12:32 P.M. on the twenty-fifth, Robert Peernock registered at the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas. This time he signed the registration card as “Robert Thomas” from Amarillo, Texas. “James Dobbs” had apparently vanished into the Twilight Zone earlier that day, leaving “Robert Thomas” to occupy room 2323 and give an expected checkout date of two days later.

  The following day “Robert Thomas” would come down and pay cash for the room, starting a pattern of visits that he would repeat every few days to settle his bill, always in cash. It was a pattern he would keep up for weeks to come.

  At noon on July 27, Steve Fisk again went to see Natasha at Holy Cross Hospital. By now the investigation had taken on an even greater urgency. The crime scene was cooling and the possibility of Peernock’s escape was heating up.

  “Try, Natasha.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can’t try?”

  “It hurts to think. I can’t think anymore.”

  “Please, just a few more questions. He’s still out there. You want us to catch him, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, then. What kind of gun was it?”

  “A little one.”

  “A pistol?”

  “A pistol. My head hurts. It hurts to think.”

  “What color was it?”

  “It was a gun!”

  “Right, but was it silver or dark blue or—”

  “Black. A black pistol. The bullets go around in a thing.”

  “A revolver?”

  “I don’t know. This hurts.”

  “Just a little more. Did you see bullets?”

  “It was a gun!”

  “Yes. But in a revolver you can see the tips of the bullets. In an automatic they’re all inside the—”

  “No, it’s a revolver. A black one. With a wooden handle.”

  At 5:30 P.M. that July 27 evening Detective Castro waited at Foothill Station for the arrival of Sonia Siegel as he had arranged with her. He planned to have her tailed once she left the station, in order to see if she was in contact with Peernock. But that wouldn’t happen. Sonia Siegel failed to show up.

  It was dark outside the hospital-room window. The television played softly in the background. Patty wandered out to stretch her legs. Tasha stirred as the sound of familiar music suddenly came out of the TV. She struggled to focus on the screen, but the images were a blur. Still, as the show came on, she realized that this was an episode of St. Elsewhere, a television drama that she had taken an interest in a few years before. The stories on the show appealed to her. And the doctors and nurses seemed more interesting than the real ones she’d met as a thirteen-year-old while lying in traction in the hospital after her father had thrown her against the kitchen wall.

  And now as the episode began she quickly felt drawn into the pleasant sense of escape, while the familiar world of the show took over. She knew the characters well enough to identify them by voice, even though she couldn’t see them on the screen.

  In this episode one of the doctors was nearly killed. The camera entered his mind as he went through a near-death experience. The few images that Natasha could make out, combined with the voices on the sound track, caught her up in a fascinating experience. It all seemed so glorious: rising up over your body, looking down upon the scene while others fought to save your life, then floating up and away into a long tunnel that opened out into a huge ball of light at the gateway to a fantastic new world.

  The spell was broken as a realization hit her. Floating? Ball of light? New world?

  She had missed the whole thing. For the first time since she’d woken up in the hospital, Natasha felt herself getting mad. She had already tasted the shock and the grief, the confusion and the fear.

  But this? Here she had come so close to having her head caved in with a claw hammer or some damn thing and the doctors had told her how she’d almost died and how at first they hadn’t even been sure they could save her, and now this?

  Nothing. Nothing at all. No floating. No tunnel. No ball of light. And certainly no sage advice from spirit guides sent to escort her onto the next plane of existence. No, if that had happened she would have remembered it for sure.

  Whether it was sheer coincidence or whether it had somehow been intended that she come across this particular TV episode right now, something had finally happened that allowed her to get a small taste, a first little inkling, of something deep down underneath all of the trauma.

  She was beginning to feel the first sharp nibbles of her outrage.

  At 2:30 P.M. the following afternoon, Lead Investigator Steve Fisk arranged for a high-level COBRA tailing unit to be placed on Sonia Siegel in the hope of locating information on the whereabouts of Robert Peernock, who was now officially listed as the primary suspect in a designated homicide case. Fisk sympathized with Siegel’s dilemma regarding the suspicions directed at her boyfriend, but this business of her not showing up for a vital interview while a suspect was at large was not going to stand.

  Then he called Dr. King at Holy Cross Hospital and obtained confirmation that Natasha’s wounds had definitely been caused by a blunt weapon, not by any sort of impact in an auto accident.

  He arranged with U.S. Customs to be alert for any attempt by Peernock to leave the country.

  He called the lab for fingerprint information and learned that while Claire Peernock’s prints had been found on the whiskey bottle, they were not on the steering wheel of the car she was supposed to have been driving.

  Even though she hadn’t been wearing gloves.

  Meanwhile, Natasha had no way of knowing how deeply she had impressed him with her story, and how strongly Fisk’s instincts were being confirmed as the evidence
began pouring in.

  “No, really, I think some of the swelling’s going down. Right here around your eyes,” Patty assured Tasha as she stroked her freshly cleaned hair.

  “You’re just getting used to looking at the Elephant Man,” Tasha muttered.

  It was supposed to have been a joking reply, but Patty noticed that most of Tasha’s comments were tending to land like lead sinkers, even when she was trying to show some humor. Her empathy for Tasha’s feelings gave a glimpse inside her friend; the darkness there frightened her. Patty understood why it should be that way, but it scared her all the same.

  CHAPTER

  11

  Victoria Doom has a youthful, animated voice and speaks in clipped, precise tones. Her conversation is focused with a good lawyer’s clarity of thought and is sprinkled with a broad base of facts, metaphors, and references.

  But she still falters when she discusses Claire Peernock. She replays that one meeting with Claire over and over in her mind, questioning the strong advice she gave at the initial consultation, wondering if there is anything else she might have told Claire that could somehow have changed the outcome of a single night that ended in slaughter.

  So while Victoria the attorney can verbally slug it out toe-to-toe with tough opposing attorneys from high-priced downtown law firms, while she can match wits with jaded judges behind closed doors in chambers, Victoria the woman has since given up her Saugus law practice and moved far away. Now she lives with her husband, a retired Air Force colonel, on a large parcel of rural land with a menagerie of exotic animals. Years after that single meeting with Claire, Victoria the woman is sure that she blew it somehow. But hindsight doesn’t help her to isolate whatever she might have done to magically reach into a troubled relationship and hand Claire some bit of advice that might have kept her from disaster.