“Help!” I shouted.
The figure didn’t hear me over the rush of water in the channel next to us. I closed the gap and then called out again.
“Help me!”
This time he stopped and turned around.
It was Detective Fortin.
I ran toward him, despite the unanswered questions that should have led me to do the opposite. Even he was a bit surprised by what I was doing. But I ran toward him simply because he wasn’t the man with the gun behind me.
Once I reached an arm’s-length distance, Detective Fortin pulled out a gun of his own. I blinked away the rain and stared at it hanging by his side.
“Oh, no,” I said out loud as I realized I was running from the wrong man with the gun.
“Yeah,” he confirmed almost reluctantly.
I processed what it meant that he’d been in Los Angeles since his “disappearance” and realized that it went further than that.
“You’ve been in LA the whole time,” I said.
Detective Fortin was there from the start, which meant he was involved from the very beginning.
Everything started to take on some semblance of order again. The discrepancy of a homeless addict getting arrested on a felony intent-to-distribute drug charge made sense when you understood that the arresting officer had ulterior motives. It was a trumped-up charge. It also helped explain how that same officer overlooked the fact that the woman who posted her bail was under investigation for fraud. Poor detective skills had nothing to do with him looking the other way. He did it on purpose because it was all part of the plan he had with Karen Arturo. They now had the leverage to get Maggie to do whatever they asked, including opening an account in which to hide money from the authorities.
One detail I didn’t understand was why the money sat for so long. The plan was clearly hatched between Detective Fortin and Karen. They subsequently murdered Maggie and staged it to frame Karen’s husband. With Phil Arturo arrested for her own murder, she was free to escape with the money. Instead, she fled to Los Angeles penniless and reinvented herself as a consultant guru. And three decades later, under extreme financial pressures, she finally set in motion the process to obtain the money.
Something Julie said the night she tried to collect the millions in my office gave me an answer. She’d made a comment about doing some bad things but then it got far worse than she’d ever imagined. Perhaps killing Maggie was never part of the plan.
“She didn’t kill any of them,” I said, realizing that Julie was telling the truth before she was shot.
Detective Fortin looked away.
“None of them?”
“They were all crooks,” he tried to justify.
I assumed Detective Fortin learned of Karen’s whereabouts when Fitch went snooping around Arizona in search of the money. He likely used Fitch in the same fashion that Julie and Lois had done. Perhaps he even convinced Fitch to dispose of Lois and with that deed completed, he then disposed of Fitch and tried to lay it on the woman who had double-crossed him so many years back. But one thing kept him from getting the money—it was riding along in the back of my trunk.
My mind raced back to the night Arturo was shot. “Again” took on greater meaning. He couldn’t believe the two people who’d tried to destroy him three decades ago were doing it again. And they had an accomplice. Lying there on the floor among construction detritus, he made the connection to the man who shot him and the calls made to Arizona on my cell phone. He died believing I had set him up. And that was something I could never undo.
“Arturo thought I was in on it,” I said.
“He was a sap, too,” Detective Fortin replied.
The qualifier could reference many people. Maybe we were all saps in his view. But there was something in his tone that made me wonder if the events from three decades ago went beyond money.
“She betrayed you, too?” I asked.
This time he didn’t have a quick answer. He had one more task to take care of.
With Julie dead, there was no one left who could tie him to any of it. He was free to spend his millions in retirement without fear of anything or anyone coming back to implicate him. But then I had to stumble upon him in the woods. And now one more person with the knowledge to hurt him had to be removed.
We both scanned the area and came to the same conclusion but with different interpretations—no help was coming.
“Why did you even get involved?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Detective Fortin opened his coat and pulled his shirttail out from his waistline. I watched him methodically wipe down the gun and then point it at me again, but this time ensuring he left no fingerprints on it.
“Jump,” he said.
“What?” I asked, even though I understood what he intended to do.
I looked down at the roiling water. There was no swimming out of that cauldron.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Detective—”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated.
“I’m not going to jump,” I heard myself saying. “You’ll have to shoot me.”
He stared at me, and I thought I was getting through to him.
But then he looked away. My eyes widened.
The roar of a gun boomed in my ear and I felt warm, stinging pain up and down my leg. I stumbled and fell to one knee. Detective Fortin tumbled backward, clutching his side as he tried to balance on the slick slope. He caught hold of my jacket with his free hand and pulled me toward him and the run-off channel edge. His feet went up and over the side, and I almost went with him. My face ground into the mud as I scratched at anything to keep from slipping in.
A pair of hands tugged at my hurt leg and slowed my descent. I steadied myself at the edge and looked down at Detective Fortin dangling over the water. He had one hand gripping my jacket and the other gripping the channel’s concrete wall.
I watched Detective Fortin close his eyes like he was taking a nap in a hammock on a warm day. Then he eased his grip on the wall. My jacket tore away and his body fell into the gray wash and was whisked downhill faster than I thought possible. It rolled and tumbled over the boulder bottom before getting hung up. As I watched, transfixed, it became another immovable object that couldn’t stop the rush of mountain water in the channel intent on finding its final resting place at the bottom of the hill.
CHARTREUSE
For the second time that day, modern machinery failed authorities. The hillside around the run-off channel was inaccessible to cranes and the treetops obstructed access from the helicopters above. So the task of removing Detective Fortin’s body from the wash fell on the Fire & Rescue team, which ended up performing a high-wire act of sorts, in which one unlucky member was lowered into the morass to secure a rope around the body so it could be lifted out.
Sierra Madre suddenly had three active crime scenes. A single murder threatened to overwhelm the small police force; three sent it into full-blown disarray. But in the immediate aftermath, it was surprisingly serene.
I rose up out of the mud and inspected the back of my leg, which was riddled with shotgun pellets. They stung mightily, but I gladly took the pain in exchange for my life.
The old man from the coffee shop broke the shotgun barrel into safety formation.
“Can you walk?” he asked.
I nodded.
“I’ll stay here while you go get help.”
I limped my way down the hill and returned some time later with a skeptical junior officer in tow. The old man was in the same position as when I’d left him.
“What’s going on, Pete?” the officer asked the old man.
It was the first time I’d heard the name of the man who saved my life.
“There’s a body down there,” he said, gesturing toward the run-off channel. “I shot him. There’s another down the hill a ways. The dead man shot her.”
The young officer looked into the channel and spotted the body and then looked arou
nd for Julie’s body, but it wasn’t visible from our position. By the time he turned back, Pete had the shotgun held out for him to take.
“Better use a handkerchief,” Pete suggested, and even offered his own after the officer’s pockets came up empty. “We’ll also need to talk about the body you all are digging up down there. I know a little something about that.”
That’s how it went. Pete told them everything, including the incriminating confession that he physically ended the old librarian’s life and helped bury the body underneath the house. I also went the full-disclosure route and divulged every last bit of information I had about Detective Fortin and the events in Arizona from thirty years ago.
It all felt a little overwhelming for the Sierra Madre police so they were more than willing to let their big sister to the west help out. Los Angeles forensics eventually matched the bullets that killed Fitch, Arturo, and Julie/Karen to the gun they pulled out of the water with Detective Fortin’s body. Pete was cleared of any wrongdoing as it related to the detective’s death, his actions justified by the circumstances and corroborated by the only witness at the scene. That left one more “murder”—the one involving the body buried under the old hunting lodge.
It was clear from the outset that the Sierra Madre police department had little interest in pursuing a charge against Pete. It was as if they were channeling Pete’s own plea to leave well enough alone. But he had made the confession and did so in the presence of quite a few people, including me. The police didn’t want to pursue it but they couldn’t ignore it, either.
Their way out came three weeks later while searching the safe deposit box at the Pasadena bank that Julie had visited hours after Lois’s murder. It contained an unopened letter postmarked 1985. In it, the real Julie St. Jean outlined the entire scheme to end her life. It was insurance in case the truth came out, as it had done some thirty years later.
I now understood the frantic visit to the bank. Julie needed to store the letter in a safe place in case she was ever caught. In the end, it didn’t save her neck but it did save Pete’s. The letter was all a reluctant police force needed to officially close the case with no charges levied. If pressed, they would ignore Pete’s confession and place the blame on a dead woman. For once, I was grateful for a police force that didn’t follow the rules.
Despite all the cases being wrapped up, the casualties continued to mount, though none as dire as the five dead—six, if you counted Maggie Fitch. Among the casualties was a professional career that never should have risen as high as it did and was already teetering on collapse.
My position as head of the group was tenuous from the start. Pat Faber never wanted me to have the role and probably looked for any reason to snatch it away. I gave him more than he needed.
While terminations were an extended ordeal, demotions were swift. I knew the hammer was going to fall but the form in which it would come was a mystery. The one thing I did know—it wouldn’t be straightforward. The first clue came in a predawn touch-base with Pat.
“How do we know we’re connecting the dots?” he asked me.
“Elaborate, if you could,” I requested, even though I knew this was the opening he sought.
“The connections between the work you’re doing, the work from the Wellness group, and the work Benefits is leading.”
As the head of all three of those groups, Pat was supposed to be the person “connecting the dots.” But I knew enough not to point that out, because he clearly had an agenda to deliver.
“Feels like there’s a gap,” he said.
And gaps always needed to be filled, I concluded.
A new role was created above me to address Pat’s nonexistent problem; then Paul Darbin was asked to fill it. That’s how we tacitly switched positions, and the man whom I lorded over became my boss.
Badger’s contract was the next casualty.
With Paul finally in charge of the group and the purse strings that kept it running, he decided that Badger and his consistently stellar work, trustworthiness, and rock-bottom hourly rate were just too good a bargain to keep under contract with our firm. He was soon replaced by an unscrupulous investigator with a nicer suit and a college-level vocabulary who charged twenty times Badger’s rate for a fraction of the work but at least wouldn’t offend Native American colleagues with culturally insensitive remarks about “wigwams.”
With what I assumed was his only income pipeline sealed off, I felt a need to put Badger right. For once, I wished he wasn’t so honest. The money delivered on the night Arturo was shot, which was eventually recovered from Detective Fortin’s car, had every last dollar accounted for.
“Couldn’t a few hundred K have gotten ‘lost’ in all this?” I asked him, as I wrote out a hefty check for his services from the last few weeks.
“No can do, chief,” he answered, bringing the check up to his nose for a deep inhalation. “I couldn’t afford to lose your respect.”
And I couldn’t afford for him to keep it. The list of home renovations would sit for another year until the next bonus cycle, as grim a prospect as that was becoming.
The thought that Paul was now the sole arbiter of my earnings made me shudder. I wasn’t exactly the fairest manager when I had the role as head of the department, and now that our positions were switched, I braced for retribution that would be fast and deep.
His first order of business was to ink ColorNalysis to a very generous contract to lead employee engagement. The second was to put me in charge of making them a success.
And so I was back in the workshop business, leading endless sessions featuring new gimmicks that tried to solve old problems. Bronson never worked on the programs directly. The guru talked strategy with his disciple, Paul, but the actual work fell on me and the matronly woman he had working for him.
“Let’s have Chuck and Ethel iron out the details,” he said, smiling.
One gem of an idea was to physically wear the color representing the personality you needed to develop. That way you projected an image of strength where you actually had weakness. All it did was set people back several hundred bucks on refreshed wardrobes. And it sentenced me to a month of wearing so much yellow that by the end of it I actually felt jaundiced.
“Hey, buttercup,” Bronson joked one day in the hall. “You should choose a personality that comes with a more appealing color.”
“Where’s yours?” I challenged, but he laughed it off as a foolish question not worth addressing.
“You’ll never get it, Chuck,” he said.
“Julie said that to me once. It must be in the consultant handbook.”
“Why can’t you see we’re doing good work here?” he asked. “We’re making progress.”
“Hamsters think they’re making progress, too.”
“Not think,” he corrected. “Believe. That’s what you’ll never understand.”
I finally got it a few weeks later during another engagement workshop. The young mom who had participated in the survey results, the one who foolishly shared her true feelings to a group of people who didn’t care, was at it again in front of the same set of managers. She looked to still be on the journey toward her “pre-baby weight” and she still got nervous when speaking in front of others, but there was something different this time. There was certitude in the way she talked about how much better things had gotten. And it all had to do with the workshop I led.
“Thank you,” her voice quavered, her splotchy cheeks an almost perfect match to the shade of salmon she’d been wearing for the last few months. “I’m a different person now.”
She really believed this nonsense. And trying to disabuse her of it felt like an unnecessarily cruel act. Also, she wasn’t the only one clinging to an irrational belief.
For six months, out of some silly fear that removing her belongings would somehow erase her memory, I delayed cleaning out the room where Rebecca had stayed. That sort of decision wasn’t exactly prudent when paying an exorbitant amount per square foot
on a room that I would never use. But as a divorced man with no kids and no prospects for any, the small bedroom had little value to me so I just left it for another day.
About the Author
Adam Walker Phillips is the author of two previous novels, The Silent Second and The Perpetual Summer. An executive at a global financial services company, he has endured countless PowerPoint decks, offsite visioning sessions, synergies, and synergistically minded cross-functional teams, all in service of telling the stories of Chuck Restic, an HR man–turned–moonlighting detective. Phillips lives in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles with his wife and children.
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