Combustion

by Martin J. Smith

  “So the argument was about that?”

  Beale nodded. “It was about Anna, plain and simple. I finally confronted him, in the boardroom just off the hallway where you came in. I closed the door and told him he needed to respect her, and me, to understand the difficult position he was putting us in.”

  “How’d that go over?”

  “You can imagine.”

  “I’d rather you tell me, Mr. Beale.”

  Beale sighed. “There are at least a dozen people who work along this corridor, besides Anna and myself. The discussion got loud enough toward the end that others obviously overheard. This place stays pretty quiet, so even if no one understood what it was about, the sheer volume probably pricked up a few ears. Then Paul stormed out, so I’m sure it was hard to ignore. There really aren’t many people involved in a foundation this size. We’re all pretty close.”

  “At any point did the discussion turn violent?” Starke asked.

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Did Mr. Dwyer make any threats?”

  “He said I could be replaced just as easily as Anna could. So yes, I took that as a threat.”

  “Did you threaten him?”

  Beale laughed, but there was an edge to it. “With what? I had no power over him. I’m his employee.”

  Starke let a moment pass. “Mr. Dwyer did turn up dead a few weeks later, Mr. Beale.”

  Beale leveled his gaze at Starke across his expansive desk. “You don’t believe I had anything to do with this, detective. You’re smarter than that. I understand why you’re here, why you’re asking these questions. It’s due diligence. But this one’s a dry well. What happened happened. I won’t deny the hard feelings. But kill Paul? The man who hired me, mentored me? The cash cow of the foundation I oversee? Does that make sense on any level?”

  “You’ve heard of crimes of passion?” Starke said.

  “I drew a line,” he said. “Paul made clear he was perfectly willing to step over it. But kill him? Why? Anna wasn’t interested in his attentions. I knew she wasn’t interested. He threw a tantrum. So what if he’d fired me? It wouldn’t have been the worst day of my life. Believe me, I’ve already lived through that.”

  Starke closed his notebook. Beale’s account of the conference room confrontation matched what he’d heard from the foundation staffers who first told him the story. “I’d like to spend a few minutes with Anna on my way out, if you don’t mind,” Starke said.

  “I told her that might be a possibility. She said she’d be willing to talk to you.”

  Starke stepped through Beale’s office door and invited Anna to join him in the boardroom where the face-off had apparently taken place.

  30

  Starke pulled the heavy door shut while Anna Esparza perched like a hummingbird on the edge of an executive leather chair, picking at a tissue in her hand. A dozen similar chairs rimmed the immense boardroom table with the Dwyer Foundation’s distinctive “PDF” logo inlaid in dark wood at its center. A small, pop-up panel at each seat offered a power outlet, USB ports, and whatever other electronic access the foundation’s board members needed during the quarterly meetings where they redistributed Paul Dwyer’s money to worthy organizations. Starke felt like he’d stepped into some sort of power vortex. The table probably cost more than any car he’d ever own.

  “No need to be nervous,” he assured her.

  Esparza was looking past him, through the room’s wide windows and into the reception area. Starke turned just in time to see Beale standing in his office doorway, arms crossed. He wasn’t smiling, and Starke was well aware of the lopsided dynamic between a wealthy older man and his beautiful young lover. He reached for the control rod of the window’s miniblind and twisted it. Beale disappeared. He did the same with the other two windows before turning his attention back to Esparza.

  “Do you feel comfortable talking here, Anna?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Because we can schedule a time to meet outside of the office, if you prefer.”

  She crumpled and recrumpled the tissue. “I’m just not sure what help I can be. But no, this is fine.”

  Starke crossed to the other side of the boardroom table and sat facing her from one of the other plush chairs. He thought it might put her more at ease, but her rigid posture remained unchanged. Her eyes tracked him like a wary cat’s, at least until he looked directly at her. Then she looked away.

  “Esparza’s a pretty well-known name around here, Anna. Your family in the construction business, by any chance?”

  She nodded.

  “Rafael’s daughter?”

  “Granddaughter. Mario’s my father.”

  Esparza & Sons Excavation and Construction dominated the building trades in Riverside County, not just private development but the lucrative public works contracts that often went along with it. The company dealt in excavation and concrete work, mostly, and Starke knew its trucks and Spanish-speaking work crews were almost always around anytime ground was broken for a public park or housing tract. Rafael was the patriarch of the Mexican immigrant family, rough-trade Americans by way of Sinaloa, who had come to American success the old-fashioned way: bribery, coercion, union-busting, and, when necessary, head-busting. There’d been incidents and at least one indictment along the way, but nothing ever stuck. For a fleeting moment, an odd thought crossed Starke’s mind: #sinaloathugs is trending.

  “I’m guessing your family does a lot of business with Mr. Dwyer’s development company?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t really know. I guess.”

  Entirely possible, Starke thought, given traditional Mexican family dynamics. The old man had died a few years back, but by then he’d handed off his business to favored sons and grandsons, not daughters and granddaughters.

  “My brother has been seeing the Dwyer’s daughter,” she said.

  This was news. Starke scribbled a note. “You’re talking about Chloe, then?”

  Esparza nodded.

  “So that would be your younger brother? What’s his name?”

  “Same as my father, Mario Esparza,” she said. Starke penned the name into his notebook and added a comment beside it: “Father AND son.” He took a guess. “Your dad’s running the business now?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your brother works, too?”

  She shook her head. “He’s still in school.”

  “Of course. Right. Any idea how long your brother and Chloe Dwyer have been dating?”

  “Do they even call it that anymore? High school stuff, you know.”

  “But you think there’s something between them. Hooking up? Like that, you mean?”

  “More than that. I’ve seen her a few times at my parents’. They definitely run in the same group.”

  Starke refocused. “So, then, Anna, let’s talk about Mr. Dwyer for a minute. Would that be OK?”

  Starke wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Esparza seemed to tense even more. “I don’t really work for him,” she said. “Didn’t. I work mostly for Mr. Beale.”

  Starke held up his hand. “Anna, just so you know, Mr. Beale filled me in on your relationship.”

  Her eyes dropped, and she focused on her tissue again. It was nearly shredded now.

  “He also told me there was some tension here in the office, between himself and Paul Dwyer, right here in this room, in fact.” He waited for a reaction, but got none. “Can you tell me anything about that?”

  She shrugged again. “I wasn’t in the room that day, so I don’t really know.”

  “But everyone else in the office seemed to know,” he pressed. “I’m told it got pretty loud. And apparently it had to do with you.”

  Anna Esparza finally looked directly at him. Her eyes flashed, and she dabbed at them with the pulpy wad in her hand. “Mr. Beale told you that?”

  Starke smiled. “Just be honest with me, Anna. What was going on? It seems like a pretty complicated situation. I’m just trying to sort everything out.”
r />   “Complicated?” she said, her voice trembling. “Complicated. Yes.”

  Starke waited while she composed herself. Finally, she cleared her throat and spoke. “No disrespect to Mr. Dwyer. I know he’s done a lot of good around here. I know how much money he gives away. That’s such an honorable thing, and I love being a part of this foundation.”

  “But?”

  Esparza seemed to regain her confidence, but still wouldn’t look him in the eye. “He was making me really uncomfortable. Us.”

  “In what way?”

  For the next few minutes, Esparza told him basically the same story Deacon Beale had told a few minutes earlier—how she’d grown to admire Beale as he suffered alone through his wife’s long illness, how after Dottie Beale died her admiration transformed, unexpectedly, into fondness for her boss, and then love. How as she and Beale got more involved, Paul Dwyer ramped up his own attentions toward her. “It was a game to him,” she said. “Like some weird little competition.”

  “And you found his interest in you uncomfortable?” Starke asked.

  “Intensely. Just the aggressiveness of it.”

  “Around the office, you mean?

  Esparza rolled her eyes. “Here. Anywhere. Once he sent flowers to my apartment. Then to my parents’ home. Followed me to my gym.”

  Devil’s advocate time, Starke thought. “And you didn’t find it flattering to have the attentions of such a rich and powerful man?”

  She glared, meeting his eyes for the first time. “Stalking isn’t flattery. Neither is shoving your hand—”

  Starke waited for her to continue. Instead, she chewed her lower lip.

  “So Mr. Dwyer got physical about it then?” he prompted.

  The young woman swiveled her chair to face him, but her eyes went back to her lap. “He was practically humping my leg.”

  “And you’d made clear to him you weren’t interested?”

  “Every. Single. Day. I asked him to stop, to the point of being rude. Mr. Beale asked him.”

  “Do you think that’s what led to the shouting match between them? The one everyone overheard?”

  “I know it is. Even my father—”

  Esparza stopped suddenly and chewed her lip some more.

  “Again, your dad is Mario, same as your brother, right?” he prompted.

  Esparza’s voice trembled when she spoke again. “We were all clear with Mr. Dwyer.”

  “So even your family knew all this was going on?”

  Esparza stood, walked to a wastebasket in the corner of the room, and tossed in her shredded tissue. Starke bore in as soon as she sat back down.

  “Your father got involved? Your brother?”

  “They knew I was handling it,” she said.

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  A tear rolled down Esparza’s flawless cheek. She brushed it away with a long, perfectly manicured finger and, for only the second time, looked him straight in the eye. “Daddy wanted to talk to him.”

  “To Mr. Dwyer?”

  She nodded. “I told him no. Begged him.”

  “Did he listen?”

  Esparza rolled her eyes. “To me? He’s old-school Mexican. What do you think?”

  “He’d known Paul Dwyer a long time,” Starke prompted. “They do a lot of business together.”

  She nodded. “Since my grandfather.”

  “But your father was still willing to confront him about this?”

  “Business is business, Daddy always says.”

  Starke waited before responding. Finally, he said: “But this wasn’t business.”

  “No,” she replied. “No, it wasn’t.”

  The comment lay between them until Esparza stood up and nodded toward the conference room door.

  “May I go?”

  “But Anna, do you know if your father ever confronted Mr. Dwyer?”

  She shrugged, opened the door, then asked a question of her own: “Why are men such assholes?”

  31

  It was an ancient thing, this dog, white-faced and creaky and gentle as a lamb. When it got up from its bed to investigate the footsteps echoing through the empty house, it approached with its tail wagging, its head down, and its untrimmed nails tick-tick-ticking across the stone kitchen floor. It died after a single jolt from the Taser, writhing, frothing, and shitting in a convulsive scramble until its heart simply stopped beating.

  The worst part was cleaning up the mess—nothing should dilute the message—then getting the dog and all the stuff out to the pool. The house was huge, but there was plenty of time to work. Shelby and Chloe weren’t due home for hours. They were at the catered reception that followed the graveside service. Still, there was a lot to do. Why take chances? Move fast.

  First, what to use for an anchor? There was a stunning industrial sculpture in the front hall, no doubt heavy, but maybe too heavy for one person to wrestle across the patio to poolside. It was worth a try. A little test lift and, actually, it was perfect—heavy enough, sturdy, and designed in a way that made it easy to carry. Probably expensive, too. That was a nice touch.

  Second, moving eighty pounds of dead-weight dog. It was a cinch compared to Paul Dwyer—now that was an operation, and at night no less—but still a surefire way to work up a sweat. Latex gloves don’t exactly breathe.

  Finally, the finishing work at poolside. Two unsubtle passes with the duct tape around the dog’s muzzle. The poor thing was just the messenger. With a few loops around the legs and a couple of well-placed knots, the hemp rope made a nice harness. The free end fit nicely through a solid ring in the sculpture, and with a double knot there and one more loop around both dog and anchor for good measure, plus a little slack, the whole package was ready to deliver in maybe ten minutes.

  Then it was just a matter of shoving the sculpture off the edge of the pool deck. It dragged the limp dog down the angled floor to the pool’s deepest point, and within a minute had scraped its way to the low point at the drain. The dog’s groomed blond coat stood out nicely against the bottom.

  Even so, with everything else going on they might overlook it for days. Eventually it would bloat and rise to the end of the anchor rope and would hang there, suspended four feet from the drain. After a while, the smell would surely bring them to the pool’s edge wondering what the hell?

  Or maybe they’d realize the dog was missing and go looking. Finding it right away would be the best thing of all. The sooner Shelby got the message, the less likely she’d be to say something stupid.

  32

  Starke peered into the ordered fluorescence of the Video Depot store, waiting for the end of Eric Barbaric’s shift. Barbaric had worried all the way there about how he’d get home.

  “Tell you what,” Starke had said eight hours earlier as the grateful kid got out of his car. “Since you’re doing me a favor trying to track down that hard drive, I’ll swing by later and give you a lift home. Deal?”

  It was a calculated kindness. The cash he’d slid the kid would at least guarantee some effort on Barbaric’s behalf. But Starke needed more than that. He really needed Barbaric to step up. With each interview, the list of people who seemed relieved by Paul Dwyer’s death got longer, not shorter. He still was curious about Skip Bronson, the acting head of Dwyer’s development company. Now he needed to talk to Anna Esparza’s father and brother. Dwyer had been disrespecting Anna Esparza in ways that got people talking. Esparza & Sons had partnered with Dwyer Development for years, decades, and their businesses had grown together into formidible Southern California powerhouses. But dishonoring family? That was something else.

  Starke dreaded the idea of going back to Kerrigan with an expanded field of suspects, not a narrower one.

  He flashed his headlights as Barbaric stepped out of the store into the parking lot. The kid grinned and jogged over. “Woot!” he said, climbing in. “You came back.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  Barbaric handed over a DVD case. Starke read the spine: “W
ayne’s World.”

  “Five-day rental,” he said. “By Monday at midnight. No charge.”

  “Thanks.”

  Starke steered from the parking lot onto the street. It’d been dark for an hour, but there was still an orange glow on the western horizon from the distant wildfire he’d heard was giving the fire crews fits.

  “After I dropped you here earlier, I remembered another question I wanted to ask you,” Starke said. “Computer related.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Ever hear of a company named Vanguard? It made old-style computer monitors, big-ass things, for a while back in the early 1980s.”

  Barbaric looked out his window at the passing cars. “Dude, like, I wasn’t born until 1994.”

  “No, I realize that. I just thought maybe you knew of people who collected old computer equipment and early tech-era stuff.”

  “You google it?”

  Starke nodded. “Found a bunch of websites. The collectors seem pretty organized, even have a ‘Computer Collector’s Code of Conduct’ posted at one. ‘I will do my best to find a home for any classic or unwanted computer,’ that sort of thing. Serious stuff.”

  Even in the dark car, Starke could see the contempt on Barbaric’s face. “There are people like that. I don’t know anybody like that. I wouldn’t want to know anybody like that. But sure, they exist.”

  “But anybody around here? That’s what I’m asking.”

  Barbaric shook his head. “I used to know every wonk in Los Colmas, back in the olden days five or six years ago. That was before the pod people.”

  “Pod people?”

  “The ones in all those phat new houses. They pod two hours into LA every day to work, then pod back because they have to ‘live’ way the fuck out here,” he said. “Some of them may do something annoying and pathetic like collecting old PCs, but I wouldn’t know.” He snorted. “Never got that, collecting. To have a bunch of stuff just to look at? I mean, what’s the point? It’s like—you ever watch that big dog show on ESPN?”

  “Westminster?”

  “Whatever. They have these dogs, I mean, they’re good for nothing, your so-called ‘toy’ breeds—impractical fucking things, you know? Put ’em on a pillow and look at ’em. That’s about it.”