“How long did the SPD look for him?”
“Couple of weeks, but Pomeroy was in the wind after the first few days. I spent a year trying to track that shit weasel down. Pardon my language. And I address that to the actual shit weasels—they get offended when you compare them to Pomeroy. And they don’t even exist! Anyway, finally, I gave up. But it looks like you found him for me.”
“Actually, he found us.”
“Ojai,” said Karen. “That’s where the real Refn lived. And died. Pomeroy was easy to track from there, once he had turned himself into Refn—a long trail of wrecked families and empty bank accounts. At some point as he worked his way east he got involved with local theater companies. He looked good and picked up the lingo. His resume was counterfeit, too. He sold himself as the breath of fresh air, the young new modern cool hip exciting genius who could revive their theater—while he was busily draining the operating fund and blackmailing the board members like he did here, picking the low-hanging fruit, and moving on. I spoke to one of the women. She had refused to press charges but she wanted me to hear her story. She said Refn told her once, “I love theater people. They need drama. I provide it.”
Roman snorted. “What a prick.”
Karen finished up. “My guess is Refn followed Galassi here. It’s an ideal spot for Refn’s kind of scam. He must have come to some arrangement with Galassi. Live and let live? They could certainly have hurt each other if they wanted to. They may have even been working together, but that’s just speculation. There’s no way to know for sure. Refn’s dead and we have nothing solid on Galassi. Except, apparently, he’s a really bad actor.”
We were still standing in front of my desk, but there was no point in inviting them to sit down. We were done and I had work to do. I shook Roman’s hand. “Thanks for making the trip, Rob. It’s good to meet you.”
“Ditto, Chief.”
“Think you’ll stick around?”
“I have a return flight Monday, but who knows? You have enough divorce up here to support a sleazy old parasite like me?”
“Oh, yeah. And we also have a long history of people coming for the weekend and staying forever. Word to the wise.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
Karen said, “I’ll show you out.”
I stood alone in the office after they left, thinking hard. The information about Refn and Galassi was interesting—I like filling in the missing pieces, even if they were only bits of sky above the main image in that jigsaw puzzle picture. But ultimately, none of that mattered. What I cared about was our new playwright-in-residence. Suddenly, he had a motive, the most compelling motive imaginable, and if his alibi fell apart the way I felt sure it would, he’d had plenty of opportunity, as well. Karen Gifford had handed me my killer. All I needed was enough evidence to indict him, and I knew exactly where to look for it. The case was as good as closed. Blair Hollister had killed Horst Refn in cold blood.
And I was going to take him down for it.
Chapter Sixteen
The Interrogation
“Whoa, hold on there, Robo-cop. Take it easy.”
Jane and I were eating dinner at Ventuno, celebrating the book contract for her latest Madeline Clark mystery novel. My kids were baby-sitting Sam, after a cold-blooded negotiation between warring siblings that gave Carrie sixty-five percent of their earnings. “I’m the oldest,” she had announced, ending the dispute. “If anything happens I’ll have to take the responsibility for both of you. I think your thirty-five percent is quite a generous offer.”
Stingy people always think they’re generous, and Carrie had inherited her mother’s penny-pinching along with her temper. But Tim knew when he was beaten and soon they were all happily settled around the TV with microwave popcorn, watching a Harry Potter movie. Carrie had just hit the pause button to deride the rules of Quiddich as Jane and I slipped out the door.
Jane took another bite of lobster and let me mull her rebuke. The restaurant was jammed and noisy, with drinkers three-deep at the bar and waiters two-stepping and pirouetting between the tables. The NTL board lunch table was next to us. I studied it over Jane’s shoulder as three couples conducted two conversations perfectly matched to place and gender. The women were dishing a mutual friend’s imminent divorce; the men were mocking a rival’s over-purchase of poplar trim stock for his over-budget spec house. I much preferred the women’s topic and wondered idly if Rob Roman might wind up with a new client soon. I had a feeling he was on the Rock to stay.
Meanwhile, Jane was waiting for a response.
“I haven’t arrested anyone yet.”
She put on her gruff Western sheriff voice. “We’ll give him a fair trial—before we hang him.”
“So now I’m Judge Roy Bean?”
“The only law west of the Pecos. Open a saloon and build a scaffold.”
I cleared my throat. “Just for the record, Bean wasn’t much of a hanging judge. He only sentenced two people and one of them escaped.”
“Details, details.”
I tilted my chin up, the gesture like an underhand throw, gently tossing her attention toward the dining room behind us. “That’s the table where the board members were having lunch when Hollister stole Galsssi’s phone.”
“If he stole Galassi’s phone.”
“If. But someone did. And this was the perfect opportunity, just as Joe Little got sick, and no one was paying attention to anything else.”
“You’re saying he poisoned Little’s lunch?”
“Maybe. I want to check with the kitchen staff and the wait crew. But maybe it was just an inspired improvisation, like Marcus Mariota throwing a touchdown pass to himself in the playoffs.”
“Or maybe you’re barking up the wrong tree.”
“Yeah. But dogs rarely do that. They pretty much know where the squirrel went, even if they can’t catch it.”
“That’s why you have to be careful—Maddie Clark says it’s like playing pick-up sticks. You want to lift each piece of evidence without disturbing the others.”
“Oh, my God. I’m taking advice from a fictional detective.”
“Which is more than Chief Bloat would ever do.”
“So how do I proceed?”
“Well…Maddie would quietly check out each little twig of Hollister’s alibi, and gently remove it, not disturbing the others. If the alibi checks out, fine. You move on. If not, you have the element of surprise in your favor. You’re ready to go to the judge, get that search warrant, and pounce.”
“Maddie Ckark never pounces.”
“No, she gets Chief Bloat to pounce…and then lets him take the credit.”
I toasted her with a forkful of dripping lobster. “Sounds like a plan.”
I started the next day. It didn’t take long.
The WAVE bus driver, Toby Vollans, on duty the day of the murder, had no recollection of Hollister. Chris Felleman, the funny actor/cab driver from Brant Point Taxi, ditto. He had met Hollister, though—at the auditions for Who Dun It. That was where they had run through their impromptu “Who’s on First” routine.
I talked to Chris while he drove me out to ’Sconset in his cab. He did most of the talking and I was happy to listen.
“…oh, yeah, Hollister offered me a role in the play if I’d swear he drove me out to Cisco. And I never got the part! Can you believe that? Then it turns out somebody got killed that same day. Is Hollister a suspect? Man, I sure hope not. He said he was gonna find something for me later. He was talking about True West. Refn was planning some kind of Sam Shepherd tribute. Like anyone cares about the Theater Lab doing a tribute! But whatever. I’ve always wanted to play Lee in True West. With Refn gone, that’s probably never going to happen. If it ever was. And Hollister’s leaving the island when the show closes. Going back to Tinsel Town! Or to jail. Fucking Hollywood big shots. He thinks I’m nothing? Well,
maybe I am, but I never killed nobody.”
I asked him if he would be willing to come in after work and sign a formal statement. He agreed. Then, just as he dropped me off at the station, he added one more detail. “I did give Hollister a ride, though, about a week before the murder. Took him out to a house on Cliff Road—big old pile with a big hedge and a shell driveway. It was a real early call. I had just taken my brother to the boat. He jumped out of the cab, put something down on the table on their deck, like an iPod or one them metal wallets they used to advertise on TV? Then he jumped back in and I took him home. I figured he was returning something he borrowed, or maybe delivering something he found in the street. ’Cause, like, a wallet would have had a driver’s license with the address. So, I don’t know, but that’s what happened, if it’s any help.”
It was a big help. Joe Little lived on Cliff Road. And now I had a witness to Hollister returning his cell phone.
The next stick to extricate from the pile: Judith Barsch’s housekeeper, Carmen, who had supposedly greeted Hollister when he came to the house for his meeting, and called him a cab back to town.
“I never saw him,” she told me. We were standing in Barsch’s spacious kitchen while Carmen shredded pork for her signature chiles rellenos. “I remember so well because that was the day we almost lost our Corky.” At the sound of his name, the pit bull lifted her head off her paws and let her tail thump the floor just once. Then she went back to guarding the kitchen and waiting for scraps.
We had nothing more to say. I told her I wished I could taste the finished meal, and she said, “Mrs. will invite you for dinner and I make special.”
Lovely woman, and she had just destroyed the last vestiges of Hollister’s alibi.
I had enough to get a warrant, and three hours later I was picking it up from Judge Perlman’s office. I took Haden Krakauer, Charlie Boyce, and Karen Gifford with me to Hollister’s Theater Lab residence.
The big ramshackle house on Rugged Road that the Theater Lab rented for staff and visiting actors was empty when we got there, everyone rehearsing or at the beach. The door was open and I had called ahead to Tim Hobbes to let him know we were coming.
The house had five bedrooms and we searched them all, on the assumption that Hollister might have concealed incriminating evidence among someone else’s possessions, but we found nothing. The place was a mess, with the notable exception of the two upstairs rooms where the two SAG actors from New York, Ted Brownell and Celia Dunbar, took refuge from the post-adolescent squalor.
We saved Hollister’s room for last.
Five minutes into the search I found ten hundred-dollar bills. I would have bet a real thousand that they were counterfeit. I was studying them, wishing for Otto’s yellow pencil, when Karen Gifford emerged from the closet with the sim card-cloning hardware. She held it up and slightly away from her body, as if it were contaminated, like roadkill or a severed hand. For the first time it occurred to me that the netrile gloves we wore during these searches functioned as much to protect us as to preserve the crime scene. The air itself, dense with the scents of unwashed laundry, mildew, and burned coffee, felt tainted somehow, as if this were a plague house, not a killer’s bedroom. I fought down the irrational desire for a face mask. There was nothing contagious here for healthy people
I took the blue plastic box with its single USB port from Karen’s hands and turned it over. “Is this what I think it is?”
“Sorry. Hollister seemed like a nice guy.”
“You met him?”
“I read the article in N Magazine. And he’s had such a horrible time. His mother, and then the trial…the learning about these—people…and feeling so helpless. I can almost understand why he might…”
“That’s a motive, not an excuse.”
“I know. But I still feel bad.”
I nodded. “Me too.”
Our next stop was Hollister’s little office at the Congregational Church. We didn’t expect to find much there, and the cubicle, tidy and bare, offered little opportunity for a significant discovery: a desk with a password-protected iPad and a notebook with revision notes; a glass full of throw-away fountain pens, a wooden chair, an inspirational black-and-white photograph of Agatha Christie pinned to the wall, a pinking old snapshot of nine- or ten-year-old Hollister and a pretty woman in her mid-thirties, his mother I assumed, at the beach somewhere, smiling and happy. Better days. There was a navy blue windbreaker hanging on a hook, lining intact, pockets empty. The room yawned at us, mute and blank.
I checked the trash on the way out—crumpled papers, takeout coffee cups, used yogurt containers, plastic cutlery, a Claritin package…and the haunted can of keyboard cleaner. It was back. Almost full, thrown away, with no keyboard to clean. I didn’t believe in ghosts and I wasn’t going to waste any time looking for Eugene O’Neill’s shoes.
Instead, I pulled on another pair of surgical gloves, plucked the can out of the trash and gave it my undivided attention. I was reading the directions and warnings when the final one jumped out at me so hard I reared my head backward. “Jesus.”
“Chief?”
“If this spray comes into contact with your skin, it causes frostbite.”
“Wait, what? It’s keyboard cleaner. All it has to do is blow air at the keys.”
I handed it over. “See for yourself.”
She skimmed the text. “This is crazy. Who makes a product like this? And why would you? Unless it’s cheaper, somehow. It’s like…some kind of absurdist critique of capitalist economics.”
She was drifting off-topic. “Karen. We need to take a scraping from Refn’s face. I’ll bet my pension the specimen will show the presence of this product. Bag the can and let’s get out of here.”
My pension was safe. Monica had the results in less than twenty minutes. I sent Karen and Charlie to make the arrest. They left Hollister in a holding cell, but I waited a couple of hours before I went to see him. I wanted him tense, off-balance, scared, and hungry.
Hollister was handcuffed to the table in the interrogation room when I walked in.
“Chief!” he tried to rise but the cuff caught him and he sat down awkwardly. “What’s going on? What am I doing here? These two storm troopers showed up at the Theater Lab office and—”
“Storm troopers?”
“They barged in, and—”
“Did they threaten you?”
“Uh, no…”
“Did they injure you?”
“No, but—”
“Did they even handcuff you? They’re legally permitted to restrain a felony suspect.”
“No, they didn’t, but—felony suspect? I’m a felony suspect?”
I sat down opposite him. “We’re being recorded, Blair. So, first of all, I have to make sure that my officers informed you of your rights.”
“Yes. Yes, they did.”
“Do you want a lawyer present today?”
“No, I’m good.” He smiled. “Funny phrase, isn’t it? People use it all the time now. ‘I’m going for coffee, want one?’ ‘No, I’m good.’ But at this moment I mean it literally. I’m good, Chief. Not evil, not a felon, not a killer.”
“Killer?”
“Come on. Jesus! There’s been exactly one crime on this island since I got here. You’ve already interrogated me about it.”
I spoke to the room, the hidden microphones. “Suspect has waived his right to counsel.”
“Can you talk to me instead of the tape recorder?”
“Sorry. I’m done. Formalities complete.”
“Good.”
“So…”
“So I didn’t kill anyone!”
“Ever?”
“I hit a dog with my car once. But he lived.”
“An accident, I’m sure. But you had good reason to kill Refn. And Judge Galassi.”
“
Is he dead, too? Is that what this is about?”
“No. Not yet.”
“And every minute I’m in here and no one’s getting killed makes me look more even more guilty.”
I nodded. “Sitting with me would be an excellent alibi if someone were killing Victor right now.”
“But they’re not.”
“To the best of my knowledge.”
“Oh, well. A boy can dream.”
“A lawyer would have counseled you to avoid statements like that.”
“Lawyers have no sense of humor.”
“And you keep yours, even under duress.”
“One of my finer traits. Besides—only an innocent man would make a remark that incriminating.”
“Unless he wanted to get caught.”
“Then count me out.” He leaned across the desk. “In fact, this is my worst nightmare. Literally. I’ve been having this dream since I was twelve years old—being arrested for a crime I didn’t commit. Like Joseph K.”
I offered him the first sentence of Kafka’s novel: “Someone must have been lying about Joseph K., because without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.”
“Exactly. So just let me go.”
“As soon as you give me a new alibi.”
“What’s wrong with my old alibi?”
“Blair.”
“I’m serious. What’s wrong with it?”
I exhaled, trying to clear the lies and bad intentions out of my lungs. “No one corroborates it.”
“You mean the WAVE bus driver—”
“Toby Vollans. He has no recollection of you.”
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