by Lee Bellamy
Salvador took one hand off the hoe and reluctantly clasped mine. He grunted, and shook it briefly.
Well, I'd try once more. For some unknown reason I wanted this little man to like me. I dredged up the remnants of my tenth grade Spanish. "Buenas tardes, Señor Perez. ¿Cómo está usted?"
A pained expression crossed the old man's face. "Besa me cola." He turned his back to me and continued his hoeing.
"What did he say?" I asked Perez.
"He's delighted to meet you."
I gave him a look. "I'll bet. He doesn't like me."
"He doesn't like your Spanish. You said good afternoon instead of good morning."
"I was close. How do you say it then? Buenos...buenos..."
"Don't worry about it." He laughed and took my arm. "Come on, let's go inside."
We went in a back door into a big, busy kitchen. A young woman stood at the stove. Three little children romped on the floor. He's married. "Meet my sister Consuela and her kids," Perez went on. He spoke in Spanish to his sister and led me into the living room. It wasn't House Beautiful, but it was okay. Comfortable furniture—lots of books and magazines. A giant flat screen TV sat on a TV stand in the corner with surround sound speakers and a DVD player on the shelves beneath.
A big calico cat with an expression as uppity as Barnicut's strolled into the living room, tail high. Perez scooped him up and stroked him. "This is Elpidio."
I smiled and stretched out my arms. "Hi, Elpidio. Here, let me have him." I love cats. I have a way with cats. I took this one and cuddled him to my chest. Elpidio went into his limp cat act immediately, purring loudly. I stroked his long, sleek fur. "This your cat?" Perez nodded. I gave him a conceding smile. "So you own a cat, so you can't be all bad."
He returned a grin. "Does this get me off your shit list?"
"Don't press your luck." I sat on his couch, set Elpidio in my lap, and opened my purse. "I came over here for one reason." I pulled out the disk and handed it to him. "Let's take a look."
"Aha." Perez took the DVD, glanced at it, flipped it in the air, and caught it. "So okay, let's play this mother."
He shoved the DVD into the player. With his finger on the start button, he paused and looked around. "Just one thing..." He studied me, his expression grown serious. "Have you ever seen a porn movie before?"
"Dozens."
"Yeah, sure. Look, this isn't Disney. And if you're not used to it—"
"Let's get on with it. I'll be fine. We don't even know if it's the right one."
Perez pressed the button. A title flashed across the screen, black on white: Virgin in the Pines. So here it was—the snuff movie. There went the goose bumps again.
No credits. The title dissolved to a grove of pine and redwood trees. In the center stood a long, low altar covered by a white cloth with a gold cross emblazoned in the center. A reedy Mozart piano concerto played softly in the background.
An old memory surfaced in my mind: "The Singing Cathedral Tree," a tourist trap up north somewhere where my parents took me ages ago. All I can remember is a grove of redwood trees, a cleared space with an altar, and a soprano blasting "Ave Maria" from an ill-concealed phonograph behind it. Except for the pine trees, this could be the same place. It was just as phony.
A fair-skinned girl in a filmy white dress, white stockings, and little white ballet shoes skipped into the scene. A wreath of pink flowers with a veil attached crowned the mane of long black hair that floated cloud-like down her back. She stooped to pick some flowers, sniffed them in delight, then broke into sort of a frolicking virgin ballet—swaying, turning, leaping—stopping now and then to sniff her posies. She wasn't a very good dancer.
Crystal.
I didn't have to see her face up close to know. "Danced like a tree stump," Gussie said, and that's what this girl was doing. After five years of ballet at Miss Severance's dancing school, I knew a good tour jeté when I saw one. Crystal's was not. She leaped as if her feet were sand-bagged, landing with the grace of a bounding cow. She moved her arms as if she were pumping iron. She forgot to point her toes. When the camera finally closed in, I felt no surprise. This was the beautiful face in the newspaper picture. This was Crystal.
The scene went as Rudy said. After she'd danced a short while, three men in black studded leather roared up on motorcycles. Two of them looked like Mountain Man with their great bushy beards. The third, the biggest and tallest of the three, appeared to be beardless, a black mask covering his face. A big snake tattoo curved around his right arm.
Talk about poor acting! When she saw the bikers, Crystal went into a cornball, Perils of Pauline routine. Her hands flew to either side of her face, fingers spread, and she let out fake scream after fake scream. She started to run, not too fast, so of course they caught her. They dragged her back, kicking and screaming to the altar, where she kept begging hysterically, and unconvincingly, "No! please no!" a performance for which she would never have won an academy award.
The three brutes started to rip her clothes off. She kept fighting, but lost, naturally. The virgin dress went; next, her bra and panties; then they hoisted her up on the altar and spread her legs apart. Just like Rudy said. That's when my amusement at Crystal's bogus acting began to fade. Real or not, this was turning into an ugly, brutal rape. It wasn't funny anymore.
Perez sat quietly next to me, intent on the screen. I wasn't embarrassed exactly, but here we were, in the middle of the morning, sitting on his couch watching an explicitly graphic sex scene. I became acutely aware of his maleness, and my breathing. Sitting perfectly still, eyes straight ahead, I tried to breathe normally. The more I tried, though, the more conscious of it I became and the tighter I got, until a steel band tightened around my chest and I could hardly breathe at all.
He looked my way, grabbed the remote, and stopped the movie. "Are you okay?"
"Yes. Why do you ask?"
"Your face is red. You look like a gasping fish."
"Thanks a lot, Perez." I gulped some air. "Just keep it going."
The DVD continued. The three men took their turns in an animal frenzy. Crystal's shrill screams were mixed with the rapists' savage grunts and obscenities, seeming even more perverted against the muted strains of the Mozart concerto. Nothing escaped the camera. It dwelt on Crystal's private parts, and close-ups of penises so huge they made The Destroyer at the sex shop look puny. Especially the masked man. No wonder he was the star. I would never have believed the male organ could be that big, but there it was. He couldn't be faking. Then came the phoniest part of all: Crystal stopped begging and started to smile. Oh, sure. So the virgin suddenly decides she likes it?
One good thing. I got so disgusted, I forgot about my breathing.
The two bearded ones finished and left, leaving the masked one alone with Crystal, still on top of her, still humping away. He stopped finally, and drew back. And then, as Rudy said, he reached into his boot. With a satanic grimace, he pulled out a long-bladed, gleaming knife.
By now, Crystal had stopped smiling and looked drained and disheveled. The scene had run straight through, no cuts that I could see, so even pretending, she had to be exhausted. The masked man appeared engrossed in the knife, turning it over and over in his black-gloved hands. She lay there looking up at him, naked and panting, her wreath of pink flowers askew, her dark hair spread in a tangled fan across the altar. "What's that?" she asked, in a tone both tenuous and unbelieving—the first genuine piece of dialogue I'd heard her say.
"It's a knife, honey," he answered in a deep voice, seeming surprised that she would ask.
A tentative expression crossed her face. "What are you going to do with it?"
His black-gloved hand encircled her throat. "Precious girl, I'm going to kill you."
The last vestige of Crystal's phoniness dropped away. She struggled to sit up, but like a pin through a butterfly, the bare, steel-like arm prevented her from moving. Her expression went stiff with horror. "Randy," she screamed, "what are you doing?"
"Giving you
the ultimate experience, baby." His voice was low and evil. "Want to please your fans?"
It was clear what was coming next, and my heart went wild. I squeezed my eyes shut and turned my head away.
"Hey, are you all right?" Perez stopped the DVD again.
The choice was mine. This girl was about to be murdered. I could refuse to watch, thereby making a wimp of myself in the eyes of Perez; or I could sit there detached and watch it objectively like I was supposed to do, and not bat an eye. I would try. After all, it was only a little box over there, a little box with a little picture that wasn't real. "Why are you stopping, Gil? Are you getting queasy? Do you want to leave the room?"
He slanted a look of disgust at me. "Besa me cola."
"Your father said that. What does it mean?
"Kiss my ass."
"Start it up."
"You're sure?"
"You heard me."
In the midst of Crystal's last scream, the masked man plunged the knife into her smooth white neck a little below her left ear. In one deft, sure motion he carved it around to right ear. She was still screaming as the blood spurted out, farther than I ever thought blood could go. Not for long, though. The flow of blood quickly turned to a trickle; the scream changed to a gurgle and faded away as her body twitched, and, finally, lay still.
The masked man looked down at himself, and saw he was covered with blood. "Messy," he hissed with disgust. He reached for the remnants of Crystal's ripped white dress and used it to wipe himself, then the knife. With complete nonchalance—as if he'd finished a tennis game instead of a murder—he tossed the dress to the ground, shoved the knife into his boot, and disappeared.
With the music still playing, the final shot zeroed in on Crystal's body, lingering, almost lovingly it seemed, on the limp legs dangling from the altar; on her open crotch; on the blood oozing from the slashed throat—merely an occasional bubble now. The wreath still hung askew, only the flowers weren't pink anymore, they were red. Finally the camera found the pitiful dead face, with its lips all blue, with its eyes still wide with horror, gazing upwards, unseeing, at the towering pines.
I couldn't trust myself to speak. After a long silence that followed the fade-out, Perez pressed the stop button. "Jesus," he said. "What do you think? Do you believe it?"
"I believe it."
"So do I. What's next? Do you call Velia? Give her that DVD to prove Crystal's dead?"
Chalk one up for Perez. He wasn't telling me what to do. This was my case, my decision. But how to make it? "I don't know if I should show it to her. Logic says I should, but how cruel, just to hand it to her and walk away."
"So?"
"I'll find out who made the snuff movie. And who was Randy. And after he killed her, what did they do with the body? She's got to be buried somewhere." Time to get in gear. I stood up to go.
Perez asked, "Where next?"
"Back to the office. I want to call Sandy Wells in L.A. Maybe she can get a lead on Randy."
"If that doesn't work..." Perez jotted down a number on the back of his card and handed it to me. "Call Milo Archibald. He'll know."
I took the card. "And I want to use WorldSearch for a check on Bill Hatcher. He's a piece of sleaze if ever there was one. Also, I have the gut feeling that Jay Champion is involved, I don't care what Barnicut says. Jay and Rudy go way back. Maybe—" Into my head popped Barnicut's words over the phone to Doris, that day I was looking for a job. I’ve done business with Mrs. Champion.
"I just thought of something. Barnicut said B & P did some work for Velia Champion. Do you remember what it was?"
"No. It was Reece's case, not mine."
"I'll find out. Are you coming with me?"
"Can't, I've got to take a run to San Francisco. Use my office if you want."
A group of noisy children burst into the living room. I made a hasty exit out the front door.
***
In the rear storage room of B & P, Tish Regillis bent low over a filing cabinet. "Oh, yeah, here it is, Champion, Jay. You might know it would be in the bottom drawer." Tish straightened with a grunt and handed me a thick, legal size manila folder. "Cripe, this case is so old it's not in the computer."
"Thanks, Tish, you know where I'll be."
I hurried to Perez's office, spread the contents of the folder on his desk and dug in.
Barnicut might be a prick, but he was a thorough, neat, competent prick. The file was jammed with notes detailing his investigation of Champion, Jay. Close to the bottom of the stack I came across the three-page stapled document that I hoped to find. Eagerly, I skimmed it through.
CONFIDENTIAL INVESTIGATIVE REPORT
Date: September 9, 2005
Objective: Premarital investigation of future spouse
Client: Velia Hargrove
Address: 612 West Delno Ave., Fresno Phone: (555) 588-9878
Subject: Jay Champion
Address: 4490 N. Elm, Apt. 22, Fresno Phone: (555) 529-2499
Birth date: March 17, 1960, Birthplace: Tonopah, Nevada
Description: White male, full head of white hair, blue eyes, 6'5", 180 lbs, erect carriage, good physical condition, dresses well.
The report went on to give the salient details of Jay's life—that he was raised on a ranch in Nevada, that he graduated from high school in 1978 and shortly after moved to California. He married Eloise Kopp in 1984 and divorced her in 1995. He had one child, a son, Tyler, born in 1993, and for several years owned a yogurt shop in Torrance, California. He sold it in 1996.
But the real meat of the report came at the end:
Other information: 1995 to around 1997 subject was involved in the adult movie business in Hollywood. 1997-2005 subject was involved in professional gambling. During that time, subject lived in Las Vegas under the alias, Jack Crisp, and engaged in "crossroader" activities (i.e. cheating the gambling casinos.) Subject was blacklisted from major casinos in 2005 (i.e. forbidden to gamble). He moved to Fresno shortly after.
Some hero! I slammed the folder shut, scooped it up and marched into Barnicut's office. He was hunched over his desk, writing a report. "Take a look," I announced, dropping the folder on his desk. "Why didn't you tell me?"
Barnicut heaved a long-suffering sigh and with maddening slowness raised his eyes. He tilted back in his chair, and slid his hands behind his head. "You found out all by yourself, didn't you? So why are you pissed?"
"Because...because..." I realized I was sputtering. "You've been telling me what a great guy Jay is. Well, he isn't. He made porn movies. He's a gambler. A crook! The casinos had him blacklisted."
"Oh, come now. That doesn't make him all bad."
"It does to me." I dropped into a chair. "Did you give this report to Velia?"
"What do you think? She paid for it."
"If she knew what kind of man he was, why did she marry him?"
"Maybe she loved the guy. Maybe she decided his past didn't matter." Barnicut scratched his neck with insolent slowness. "Women do that sort of thing. You tell me."
"Well I'm a woman, and I don't understand at all."
"You wouldn't. It's water under the bridge anyway. He's a hero now."
"It's not under my bridge. That report shows he's a crook. And if he's a crook, he could very well be responsible for Rudy's murder."
"How do you figure?" Barnicut asked, that mocking little gleam in his eye.
"Well..." I paused and got my thoughts together. "He could have a couple of motives. First, Rudy could have been blackmailing him. He knew Jay for years. What's in the report is bad enough. Maybe there's more bad stuff, and Rudy knew. If Jay wanted to keep his reputation as a solid citizen in this town, he sure didn't want his past leaking out."
"Maybe. And what else?"
"Isn't that enough?
"Oh, do continue on, Holly. You're doing so very well."
Sarcastic bastard. "There's the matter of the trailer robbery. We've got all kinds of possibilities there."
"For instance?"
"Maybe Jay was hurting for money. He arranged for the theft of the trailers so he could collect on the insurance."
"From Afghanistan?" Barnicut snorted. "What did he do? Arrange the heist through his Facebook account?"
"It's possible. Obviously Rudy was in on it and threatened to tell." Barnicut was making me mad. I'd better get out of there. I checked my watch. "We'll talk later. I'm going to run a WorldSearch on Bill Hatcher. Then I'm going to visit Joy Daniel. Then I'm going to the cemetery."
"Have fun."
Who but Barnicut would tell you to have fun at a funeral? I got out of there fast, before I told him what I thought.
Back in Perez's office again, I turned on his computer and clicked my way into WorldSearch, that huge data base system that's such a boon. Private investigators don't have to gumshoe any more. They can sit in their nice warm office and skip trace with it—or check public record filings—or get a pre-employment background, not only for California but all the U.S. Looking for someone? Enter their name and last known address, you not only get their new address, you get back the names of ten neighbors, their addresses, telephone numbers, and length of residence.
I entered Bill's name and got a whole screenful of Bill Hatchers who lived in California. The name wasn't enough. I would need his social security number, too. I called Champion's Commercial Trailer Sales and asked Doris for the SS numbers of all the employees. She balked at first—not to my surprise. I reminded her I was working for the Champions, so she finally caved.
I typed in Bill Hatcher's name and SS number, moved the cursor to "Municipal Court, Criminal" and punched the enter button. Oh, yes. Champion's star salesman had a record three screens long. I moved the cursor to "Superior Court, Criminal" and got two screens more. Burglary—auto theft—conspiracy—extortion—mail fraud—he'd done them all. Bilking the life savings from little old ladies appeared to be his specialty.
Bill Hatcher—what a sweetheart! When I printed out the report, it was six pages long.
Chapter 11
I love the name "Joy." Anyone named Joy should be merry and bright, although the woman I'd talked to on the phone yesterday sounded anything but. I wanted to see her for a couple of reasons. She was Crystal's oldest friend. She'd "had a relationship," as Velia delicately phrased it, with Rudy. Oh, definitely, I needed to talk to her.