Yesterday's Echo

by Matt Coyle

  The bus terminal was on the bottom floor of an ancient mud-colored brick building on Broadway in downtown San Diego. Next to the modern glass-and-steel edifices that had sprung up around it, the building was an odd remnant from a passed-over era.

  There were a surprising number of people in the terminal at eleven forty on a Friday night; young mothers shepherding flocks of kids, greasy haired Euro-students, and muttering homeless souls with vacant stares, smelling of whiskey, urine, and the tail end of life. Everyone was waiting. Waiting for loved ones. Waiting for a midnight bus ride to the next town with a cheap motel. Waiting to die.

  I used to drop my dad off here when I was in high school and later home from college for the summer. My mom would get tired of his drinking and threaten divorce if he didn’t stop. He’d take a bus up to Bakersfield and stay with his sister to dry out. I’d come back and pick him up a few weeks later after he’d sobered up. His eyes would be clear then, but there’d be a shame in them that I’d hated as much as the drunken anger they held before he’d left. The last time he got on the bus, he didn’t come back for six months.

  And that had been in a wooden box.

  The terminal had changed a bit since I’d last been there fourteen years ago. 9/11 had changed a lot of things. The inner part now had a waist-high fence around it with a sign that advised that no one was allowed inside without a bus ticket. The pay lockers were inside the fence in the far left corner of the terminal. A single security guard patrolled the premises. Neither the fence nor the guard looked too formidable.

  I went through the gate and was greeted by the guard. I told him I needed to use a locker, and he waved me through. That was post 9/11 security at the Greyhound bus terminal. Maybe I just didn’t look enough like a terrorist. Or maybe a run-of-the-mill murder suspect didn’t rate a pat down. No complaints.

  The bus lockers were the kind that take cash or a credit card and spit out a paper receipt with a numerical code instead of a key or combination. They cost six bucks a day. I didn’t know how long I’d stash the computer, but I didn’t figure to go broke for at least a week or two. I put the computer with its case into the locker. The birth certificate and the ledger were also inside the computer case. I’d seen what I needed from them. Now it was just a matter of hiding the evidence for safekeeping while I figured out what to do with it.

  My cell phone buzzed in my pocket just as I exited Highway 163 onto the 805.

  Melody.

  I debated not answering it. If I hadn’t answered her call for help five nights ago, my life would be a whole lot different now. It would be normal. Routine, unexciting, safe. The life I’d needed and gotten used to after Santa Barbara and Colleen. The life I’d never be able to go back to now.

  “Melody.” The name felt like an anvil falling from my mouth.

  “I hope I’m not calling too late.” The warm gravel. It still tugged at me, even after everything that had happened. “I tried you at work, but you’d already left.”

  “I heard Fineman got you bail,” I said.

  “He’s a godsend.”

  I didn’t think even Stone would consider himself a god. Maybe a fallen angel. Like Lucifer.

  She continued, “He got the judge to grant a hearing this afternoon and to reduce bail to two hundred fifty thousand dollars.” I heard the slosh of liquid and then an exhale. Wine? Champagne in celebration of freedom? “I had to empty my savings and then go begging to come up with the twenty-five thousand dollars for the bail bondsman. I’ll figure out how to pay everyone back after we win the trial.”

  “So with Fineman taking over, did you let your other lawyer go?” Maybe Grimes had tailed me and reported to Buckley for some reason other than Melody’s defense.

  “No, he’s second chair to Mr. Fineman.” Hesitant. “Why?”

  “No reason.” Except that it meant that the man who’d arrested me for murder eight years ago was reporting to an active member of her defense team. Was she aware of this? “Is Fineman using his own investigators or hiring freelance?”

  “I leave the details to Mr. Fineman. Why, Rick? What’s going on?”

  “I just want to be sure that you’ve got good people working for you.” I’d already said enough. I didn’t want to tip off Grimes and Buckley that I was on to them. Not yet. “Doesn’t it bother you that Fineman is working at the behest of Peter Stone?”

  “It did at first. I almost didn’t agree to have him take over. But after I met him, I felt much better.” Another sip of whatever a beautiful woman out on bail drinks. “I know Peter must have his own agenda. But I trust Mr. Fineman and feel confident he’s going to convince a jury that I’m innocent.”

  By casting the shadow of guilt over me?

  I got on Highway 52. Four miles from home, my former sanctuary.

  “Go with your gut.” Mine was going in two different directions. Trust Melody and follow feelings that made me fall for her in the first place. Or run and don’t look back.

  “Rick. I want to see you.” The gravel was rich and languid. “Tonight.”

  “I thought you’d be back in San Francisco by now.” The feeling side of my gut was pulling hard, but I tried to ignore it.

  “Mr. Fineman asserted our right to a speedy trial. It’s in ten weeks. He thinks the DA has a weak case and doesn’t want to give her time to make it stronger.” A long slurp. “I’m staying at the Marriott. I could be at your house in ten minutes. We could—talk.”

  Back in Melody’s arms. Even with all the background noise, it was the only place I’d felt like the man I once was in a long time.

  “I don’t think I can tonight, Melody.” I wanted to. I wanted to wrap her in my arms and believe that the feelings of our first two nights together were true and everything else didn’t matter. Or was this another ploy to get the flash drive and key she’d left behind? But I knew I was too weak right now to trust myself. “I’m awfully tired. It’s been a long day. For both of us. Sorry.”

  “I understand.” But I could tell by the hurt in her voice that she didn’t. That she’d just needed someone who cared about her to hold her tonight. Someone she could trust. “Good night, Rick.”

  I couldn’t trust either one of us.

  Muldoon’s

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  I still had a VCR hooked up to my TV. I had all the new gadgets, too. A flat screen, a DVD player, and a DVR. But I kept the ancient VCR for the one tape I only watched once a year.

  Twenty-three minutes of Colleen. From the trip to Lake Tahoe when I proposed to her. It was already October and I hadn’t watched it yet. Maybe this would be the year I finally stopped.

  I popped the tape I’d taken from Windsor’s storage unit entitled, “Melody” into the VCR, sat down in my recliner, and braced for the worst. I got it. The time stamp was two years earlier than Angela’s, and the room and bed were different. But everything else was the same. Same camera angle. Same heroin needle between the toes. Same decayed life. Only this time the naked woman was Melody. Younger, pale, skinny, with faraway raccoon eyes.

  And worse was still to come. Men, money exchange, rough, degrading sex.

  When I’d first found the tape, I’d expected something like this. But it still gnawed a hole right through me. Had any of my time with Melody been real? Or had I just been another john, paying for sex with my protection, affection, and trust? Had I been that easy a mark? My face flashed fire. This was the first woman since Colleen I thought I might be able to love. A used-up heroin whore who still traded her body to get want she needed.

  Or maybe she’d changed and the woman on the eleven-year-old tape wasn’t Melody anymore.

  Everyone’s done something in their life that they wished they could change and try to forget. Some big, most small. All could be forgiven by God. All but one by man. But few sinners had their sins enshrined on videotape or shown on prime-time TV. Melody and I had that in common. Mine, what the media had convicted me of, was unforgivable. Melody’s just hadn’t been exposed yet.
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br />   Melody had to know about the tape. She had the flash drive of Angela Albright and the key to the storage locker. She’d probably already destroyed the drive that Windsor was surely blackmailing her with. Could she have gotten it away from Windsor without killing him? Didn’t seem likely. But were the images really worth killing to keep out of the public domain?

  Melody was on the cusp of an anchor position on the local news in San Francisco. After that, maybe network. She had the looks, the brains, and the pipes. A sex tape of her hooking and shooting heroin could derail all that. Or could it enhance it? In Celebrity America, it wasn’t so much what you did, just that you were seen. She’d be seen. Virally. And even if it went bad at first, things could flip around.

  The tape was eleven years old. After the initial shock, people would see Melody as a rags-to-riches story. The gutsy woman who pulled herself out of the gutter and went on to stardom. Even if she lost her job, there’d be a book deal, maybe a Lifetime movie, and a better job somewhere down the line. If she could handle the embarrassment, the tape might be a bigger break than she could have ever imagined.

  Surely, Melody would have worked that all out in her mind instead of killing Windsor. But she still had the Albright tape and the locker key. Those were facts that couldn’t be overlooked. She had to have gotten them somehow. When she did, Windsor had either been dead or alive.

  I started fast-forwarding through the tape, only hitting play with the introduction of a new john. I didn’t have to see the acts and couldn’t stand to. Voyeurism loses its appeal when you’re watching someone you know. And care about. Instead, I focused on the other men, trying to recognize any of them on the eleven-year-old videotape.

  According to one of Muldoon’s regular customers, Adam Windsor had started his life as a blackmailer whilst a teenager when he tried to shake the man down on a construction site. By the time he started running women, he’d refined his trade. He hadn’t taped Angela and Melody years ago in hopes that he’d be able to blackmail them in the future if they ever went straight. That had been sheer luck. His targets when he made the tapes had been the men and women, the johns and janes, who’d shared their bodies with, and inflicted their cruelties on, Angela and Melody. Maybe after he got out of prison, he’d put the finger back on some of his old victims, along with the new ones. The old ones were the wild cards in his murder.

  I was forty-five minutes into the tape before I got a hit. The man on the screen was the only one shown who didn’t pay. And the only one dressed as a cop before he wasn’t dressed at all.

  Boss Goon.

  The block of granite who’d come looking for Melody in Muldoon’s on Monday morning, who’d ambushed me, and who’d worked security during Mayor Albright’s speech on stage with Chief Parks at the rec center. A cop. Former. I thought he’d been working for Stone, but he may have been solo. He had his own past that needed burying. He’d gotten a freebie from Melody on the tape. Could it have been in lieu of his normal payoff from Windsor? I’d already made Moretti for Scarface. Could the goon be Stamp, the other name in Windsor’s payoff ledger?

  Even if he was, why kill Windsor? The statute of limitations had surely run out on the crimes exposed on the tape and in the ledger. The hard boy didn’t strike me as a guy who cared much about a bad reputation. He wasn’t a cop anymore, he was muscle. He probably thrived on a bad reputation.

  Good or bad rep, he was still a suspect. Right up there with the Albrights, Stone, and now Moretti.

  And Melody.

  I fast-forwarded, the sex acts a blur. The fast twitch movements had a numbing effect, but couldn’t quite dull the pain caused by watching them. It was after one a.m. I didn’t know how much more I could take, but forced myself to watch on. I slowed for a new john and sped up again. A minute later a spurt of red flashed on the screen. I paused the tape. The man, fetal, held his side, blood caught in mid-ooze between his fingers, Melody above him, her arm frozen in a downward arc, a knife in her hand.

  Sweat boiled out of me, my breath went staccato. I fumbled the remote and found the rewind button and went back to the beginning of Melody’s encounter with this new john. Shaved head, mid-thirties, fit. Not the kind of guy most people would picture with a prostitute. I was an ex-cop. I knew the world was full of all “kinds.” The sex had started rough, but that wasn’t unusual. Most of the men on tape with Melody had gotten off by abusing her.

  A few minutes in, the man threw Melody onto her stomach and then yanked her head by her hair and she rose up on all fours. As on the other tape, this one didn’t have sound but I could tell the man was shouting at Melody. He continued to wrench her hair and as her head whipsawed around the camera caught her face. Wide-eyed terror and her mouth contorting around the word, “No!”

  The man pushed her face down onto the bed and thrust up inside her. Anally.

  This wasn’t role playing, or an agreed upon upsell for another hundred bucks. This was rape.

  Melody’s face grimaced, but her right hand shot forward and curved under the front end of the mattress and came out with the knife. She slashed it back behind her and plunged it into the man’s side. I could almost hear his shocked shriek though the soundless tape. He rolled off Melody and balled up, blood running through fingers clutching his punctured side. Melody reared up and buried the knife in his chest, her face a demented mask. She pulled the knife out, the blade running red, and again cocked her arm for another stab. Her arm started to guillotine down and the static camera angle caught the flash of a door opening off to the left. Then everything went black.

  I fast-forwarded and got nothing but the static of erased video-tape and then rewound to the last image on the screen. The door had only opened a few inches before the tape cut out. I could only make out a blurred hand on the outer doorknob, not the person connected to it. But it had to have been Windsor. He must have been watching the live feed from another room and had rushed to intervene when things turned bloody. It looked like he’d been too late.

  I dropped the remote, tilted back the chair, and stared at the static and saw nothing but the world turned upside-down.

  Self-defense? With the first stab, yes, the second a stretch, after that, jail time. What had become of the bald man? Was it assault, manslaughter, or murder? Only Melody and Windsor knew for sure, and he wasn’t talking anymore.

  This changed everything. Melody now had motive that put her at the top of the suspect list. If she’d killed the bald man, Melody could still get her book deal, but it would be from behind bars. There was a statute of limitations on celebrity, not murder. When the spotlight dimmed, Melody’d still be in a cell. Where would I be?

  I was sitting on evidence vital to a murder case. Evidence that I’d stolen and a case that the cops wanted to make me a codefendant in, not a witness. But a one-night sheet wrestle with a woman I’d never met before was a stretch for motive. If I walked into the Brick House tomorrow with the “Melody” tape, the cops might not care how I got it. They’d be happy to hammer in the final nail on Melody and keep the town council from closing them down.

  I pulled out my phone and stared at Melody’s number. One chance for her to plead her case and make me believe in her again? I thought of the woman I’d fallen for that first night, and then of the lies she’d told and the bloody knife in her hand.

  I put the phone back in my pocket.

  Muldoon’s

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  I woke up the next morning still seated in the recliner. The TV was on and James Cagney was standing on top of a high platform, the world aflame around him, shouting, “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” Then everything blew up.

  I knew how he felt, but from the other end. I had dynamite in my hands and I had to figure out how to get rid of it without blowing myself up. Not that easy, but it was time to quit playing hero and try to escape the whole Melody affair with as little damage as possible. Time to turn over what I’d taken from Adam Windsor’s storage locker to the police.

  Dropping s
tolen evidence from a murder case off at the police department didn’t figure to be as easy as making a deposit at an ATM. I needed legal advice. I fished Elk Fenton’s card out of my wallet and called his number. Seven o’clock on a Saturday morning must have been too early for him. I left a message on his voice mail to call me.

  I had to be at Muldoon’s in half an hour. Except I didn’t. Not anymore. Turk hadn’t offered to hire me back last night and after watching him leave Muldoon’s with Stone, I didn’t think there’d be a restaurant much longer anyway. I went into the bathroom to take a shower. Might as well start off my new life clean.

  My house phone rang just as I stepped into the shower. I went naked into the living room to answer it, thinking I must have left Elk Fenton my home number instead of my cell. I picked up on the fourth ring.

  “Rick. Heather Ortiz.” She didn’t wait for a hello. “Do you care to comment on Detective Tony Moretti’s comments in the U-T this morning?”

  “I don’t read the newspaper.” But today, I’d have to. I hung up.

  I went into the bathroom, wrapped a towel around my waist, then retrieved the morning paper from the front porch. The Windsor murder case carried Heather’s byline and was still front page news. The article covered Melody’s release on bond, the upcoming trial date, and a brief biography of the lead lawyer, Alan Fineman. The story continued on page A-7 and that’s where my name showed up. Detective Moretti was asked if Melody’s arrest had cleared me as a person of interest. He said, “We’re still investigating the possibility that Miss Malana did not act alone.”

  Not exactly an exoneration. I scanned the rest of the article, looking for more bad news. I didn’t find any except for LJPD. The mayor of La Jolla and the town council had decided to put to a public vote their desire to disband LJPD and the DA’s office and farm out law enforcement to San Diego County’s Sheriff Department. The expense of putting on a high-profile case forced the politicians’ hand. Heather closed the article editorially, stating that anything less than a conviction might sway the public to the mayor and council’s point of view.