by Matt Coyle
“The cop, a big guy, blond hair, built like a truck?”
“Yes. I only knew him by the name Stamp.”
So Heaton was in deeper than just as a bagman. Possible accessory after the fact. No statute of limitations for murder. Another name on Windsor’s blackmail list? Another suspect with a reason to kill.
“Did you ever meet a cop Adam called Scarface?”
“No, but Adam mentioned his name a couple times. He was scared of him.”
“Where did you go after you left my house that first night?” I asked. “The night Windsor died.”
“I went back to my motel room, but Adam was still there.” Her tan face, now pale even in the night, weary but still beautiful. “I crushed up some of my sleeping pills and slipped then into his drink. When he passed out, I took the flash drive and the storage locker key. Adam was alive when I left. I swear. Someone else must have gone in the motel room after I left and shot him full of heroin.” Pain, fear, regret, in her eyes. “You believe me, don’t you, Rick?”
I believed her eyes. “What were you going to do with the flash drive of Angela Albright?”
A big wave walloped the cliff and found a crack in the sandstone, shooting up a geyser of whitewater that slapped down ten feet from us.
“I started in the news business as an unpaid intern while I waitressed at night. It took me a while, but I’ve finally made a decent career of it.” Her voice steadied. “Breaking the story about Angela Albright’s past was going to catapult me onto the next level. Network. New York. D.C.”
“You were going to destroy a woman who’d overcome her past just like you so you could grab the brass ring?” Maybe the only thing that had changed from the woman I’d seen on video was her career.
“That’s my job, Rick. I get paid to expose the truth. No matter who gets hurt.” She fixed her eyes on mine. Black marbles in a gray night. “And I was all set to do it. Then I watched the video and saw my wretched life played out all over again in Angela Albright’s body. I’m not that person anymore and neither is Angela. Neither one of us deserved to have our pasts exposed.”
“The nights we slept together, which Melody was that?” Did I want to hear the truth or a lie that would make me feel better?
“That first night, I was scared and you made me feel safe. I needed you on my side and I knew how to get you there.” She held my eyes and touched my face. “But I came back the next night because I needed to see you. You made me feel again. Not just react and survive. I had to see if it was real. And it was. It is.”
I knew what it was like to feel again. Melody had given me that. But had it been under false pretenses?
“But when you came back from San Francisco, it wasn’t really to see me. You needed to get back inside my house and get the storage locker key you’d hid from the police. And tonight, you wanted to meet there for the same reason.”
“Yes.” She dropped her hand, but didn’t let go of my eyes. “My feelings for you are real, Rick, but I have to survive. If the DA sees what’s on Adam’s computer, they’ll have a motive and possibly another murder charge against me. I’d be lucky to get life.”
“You could have asked me about the key instead of playing me. You could have trusted me.”
“I’ve never trusted anyone.” She dropped her head. “It was too big a risk to start now.”
The fog pressed in closer and the ocean beyond the shore break disappeared into the haze.
“What are you going to do with the computer?” Melody’s eyes had lost all their mystery. One emotion, fear.
Melody’s fate and my freedom depended on what I did with that computer. If I turned it over to Chief Parks, along with what I had on Moretti, maybe he’d choose to believe me and convince the DA to drop the grand jury. Melody had put her survival first. Maybe I should do the same with mine.
But could I live with dooming Melody to life in a cell for a murder she may not have committed in order to clear myself? I knew what it was like to be judged guilty, but I hadn’t yet lost my freedom because of it.
“What are you going to do, Rick?” Fragile, exposed.
“What I have to.”
Muldoon’s
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
I sat alone in the Caddy and stared at two business cards belonging to men I wished I’d never met. Peter Stone and Chief Parks. Both demanded to see me tonight. One offering fifty grand, the other my freedom. All I had to do was show up and give them what they wanted.
Then trust them.
I pulled the items I’d taken from Adam Windsor’s storage locker out of my backpack one at a time and studied them as if they possessed the answers to my problems. They didn’t. They just reminded me of the mess I’d gotten myself into.
The last to come out was the tape recorder I’d stolen from Heather Ortiz at the UCSD library. I turned it on and heard the hiss I’d heard earlier that morning at Starbucks. I hit rewind and after a couple seconds Heather Ortiz’s voice came on. She was talking to a Betty Brictson over a speakerphone, the recorder picking up both ends of the conversation. Heather introduced herself and explained that she was doing a story on Adam Windsor’s murder.
“I don’t know anything about any murder in California.” Middle-aged, raspy voice full of cigarettes and hard living.
“But you do know Peter Stone, correct?” Heather sounded like she knew the answer to her own question. “He’s living here in La Jolla now. Where Mr. Windsor was murdered.”
“I don’t see how this has anything to do with me. I don’t want to be rude, but I have to—”
“But you worked as a cocktail waitress at the Starlighter Casino back when Mr. Stone was the casino manager, right?”
“Yes.” Grudgingly.
“And then you left the casino when you became pregnant with Louise. That was right about the time Peter Stone married his boss’s daughter and became a part owner, correct?”
The woman sucked in a harsh grab of air.
Heather’d been busy this morning after I gave her the name on the birth certificate. Betty Brictson was Elizabeth Nelson Delano. The name of the mother on the birth certificate of Louise Abigail Delano that I’d found in Adam Windsor’s locker.
“I’m not suppo—I don’t want to talk about that.” Betty’s voice was thick with emotion or a couple cocktails. Maybe both.
“It must have hurt when Peter chose his career over you and his daughter.”
Stone was the child’s father! The chapter title in Windsor’s memoir, Father-Daughter Love. Stone and his bastard child. That’s why he wanted everything from Windsor’s locker. He wanted the birth certificate. But why?
Betty Brictson was silent for a moment. Then, “I miss her.”
“Where is she? What happened to her? There’s no record of her after her birth. Is she still alive?”
“She might as well be dead for how little contact I’ve had with her. I’ve seen her once in ten years and that was on television. She’s too important now to talk to her mama.” A sob followed by a line of hacking coughs.
“Who is she? What’s her name now?”
“I have to go.”
“Why did Adam Windsor have her birth certificate?”
Silence. No breaths. No coughs. Finally, “He was a vile human being and I’m glad he finally got what was coming to him.”
The phone went dead and so did the tape.
Louise Abigail Delano. Illegitimate daughter to Peter Stone. Could she be the key to the whole puzzle? Too important to talk to her mother and only seen on TV once in ten years. She could have been any semicelebrity who flashed to the surface for her fifteen minutes and then disappeared back into the murk.
Who was Louise Abigail Delano?
Betty Brictson knew. But even if I could track her down, she wouldn’t tell me. Stone knew, too, and he was waiting for me up in his mansion on a hill. But he’d take what I had and give nothing back. There was one more person who might know, but I doubted she’d talk to me either. If she did, sh
e might have company listening in, but I didn’t have any options left.
I looked out the Caddy window at the ocean below the cliffs. The fog had clamped down on the night. Water and sky wove together to form a gray shroud.
I started the car and drove though the sea of fog along Coast Boulevard. Headlights of oncoming cars smeared out into yellow halos sifted through a silk scarf. Stoplights were rainbow hallucinations. I cut back a few blocks through the soup until I hit Pearl Street and found the only gas station left in downtown La Jolla. An old phone booth sat next to the service garage.
I dropped in some coins and punched the big square numbers. Heather Ortiz answered on the third ring.
“Hello?” Low, almost a whisper.
“I guess you found your phone where I left it. Sorry about that. I didn’t have time to stick around and talk to the detective.” I tried to sound apologetic. Considering how she’d set me up for Moretti at the library, it wasn’t easy. “I still have your notes and tape recorder if you want them back, too.”
If Moretti and LJPD were triangulating cell towers, they’d be out of luck. A trace was possible, but I wouldn’t be in the phone booth long enough for it to matter.
“I’ll have to call you back.”
I’d gotten the result I’d feared, but not the anger I’d expected.
“Wait. Before you do, did you find out who Louise Abigail Delano is?”
“No. But I found out Scarface lost his scars. Gotta go.” Dial tone.
What the hell did that mean? Moretti’s cleft lip scar was gone? No, but it was now covered by his mustache. Maybe that’s what she meant. She’d figured out that her bedmate was Scarface, but I hadn’t found out anything I didn’t already know.
I could either run, wait for the Grand Jury to indict me, or find some answers on my own. I still had Chief Parks’s card, but his visit to Kim’s house left me with more fear than trust. I was down to a Hail Mary. And the deity I had to entreat didn’t answer prayers. He crushed them.
Stone.
Muldoon’s
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Back in the Caddy, I pulled the envelope that held Louise Abigail Delano’s birth certificate out of my backpack and wrote Turk’s address on it. I ripped a blank page from Heather’s notepad and wrote a note that the birth certificate belonged to Stone’s daughter and instructed Turk to hold onto to it until he heard from me. He owed me that. If things didn’t turn out as I’d hoped, if I got arrested, or worse, he’d know he had something valuable that pointed a finger at Stone. I stuffed the note into the envelope, then attached a stamp that I’d rummaged out of my wallet.
The La Jolla post office was just a block down from the police station on Wall Street. I dropped the letter into a curbside mailbox, making sure to stay out of view of the Brick House.
I’d need all the luck I could hold onto during my meeting with Stone.
Using my iPhone, I Mapquested the address he’d given me on his business card and set off. If I hurried, I could make his 9:00 p.m. ultimatum. He lived in one of the mansions populating the narrow streets that serpentined up the back of Soledad Mountain. Stunning views of La Jolla and the Pacific Ocean, out of reach of the common folk below. I recognized the house from my infrequent trips up to the cross at the top of the Mount Soledad. Unassuming from the front, its backside hung off a cliff, splayed out like a giant glass-and-copper crab ready to pounce.
A Mercedes SLK coupe sat in the half-moon driveway. I crept past through the shifting fog and parked on a side street above the house. Stone had told me to bring everything I’d gotten out of Windsor’s locker, but he may not have known what everything was. I knew he wanted the flash drive of him and Angela Albright and the birth certificate. He’d get one but not the other.
I wouldn’t give him Melody. Her secrets were my own for now, to be revealed later only if she took the DA’s deal and flipped on me. Windsor’s payoff ledger was my insurance policy against the police if they came after me without Melody’s help. The birth certificate was my life insurance policy against Stone. That would stay behind, too.
I pulled the flash drive from my backpack and shoved it into my pants pocket. The backpack containing the rest of the Windsor booty went into the massive trunk of the Cadillac. The night fog was cool and heavy on my face. It seemed like days instead of hours since the Santa Ana winds had swept through town and left everything raw.
I made it to the house without being seen or ambushed. Maybe the ambush was waiting for me inside. The front door was a slab of hand-hammered bronze and loomed all the way up to the eaves. It looked like it could be lowered over a moat or open into a dungeon. My bet was on the latter.
I pounded the door a couple times, stepped back, and expected the worst. The door opened and I wasn’t disappointed.
My stun-gun dance partner stood in front of me in full parade dress. Gold rings laddered up each ear, silver studs impaled through lip, and eyebrows. I had the sudden urge for a giant horseshoe magnet. The only metal missing was a stud through his nostril. That had been replaced by cotton packing to correct the nose I’d broken. I instinctively slid my right foot back a few inches and felt some flex in my knees. His mangled face lay flat, but his blackened eyes lasered violence.
The night was behind me, thick, gray, and black. One quick move and I’d be back into it. Even with my twisted ankle, I knew the kid wouldn’t catch me on the injured leg I’d aerated with a paring knife two nights ago. But I stayed still and waited for round three to begin. If he made a move, I’d meet him in the middle. But he just stood there holding open the dungeon door. We stared at each other, waiting for the other to make the first move.
“Eight fifty-eight. Just under the wire.” Peter Stone appeared over the kid’s shoulder. Insincere smile stretched above the hard chin, shark eyes zeroed in on prey. “Luke, invite our guest in.”
Seeing them together, I noticed the resemblance for the first time. Square jaws. Stabbing widow’s peaks. Hard eyes. Luke’s not quite yet dead, but on their way to Stone’s shark stare. Take away the kid’s broken nose and black eyes and the family bloodline was evident.
Father and son.
If I went inside, would I ever come out? How many holes had Stone dug back in the Nevada desert? Had he or Luke been the one who pushed the needle into Windsor’s arm?
But if Stone had wanted me dead, he’d already had plenty of chances. No, he hadn’t killed Windsor, not over a birth certificate. And if the certificate meant so much to him, I had leverage. It was time to trade.
Luke pulled the door open farther and stepped back. I entered, adrenaline at full pump, ready for the arm of Stamp Heaton to shoot out of the dark and lock around my neck.
It never did, but Luke stopped me with a hand on my chest. I tensed, ready to counter but Stone’s voice stopped me.
“Simple precaution, Rick.”
Luke patted me down, probably looking for weapons or a wire. I had only my wits. He came up empty, and motioned for me to follow his father. “Clean.”
“Of course. Rick’s a smart man,” Stone said.
I didn’t need his sarcasm to tell me that smart wasn’t the proper adjective to use for someone who’d enter Stone’s lair unarmed and alone. Desperate times.
Stone wore gray slacks and a blue La Jolla Country Club golf shirt. The normal waiting period to get accepted into the LJCC was about a lifetime. He’d been in town ten minutes and had some-how jumped to the front of a line where wealth was added up in generations instead of liquid assets.
I followed him across a grand marble foyer that swirled in black and white into a dark hardwood-floored living room. The entire back wall was glass and looked down on La Jolla. On most nights it must have been quite a view. Tonight it was a gray smudge.
Cold art and framed mirrors hung at sharp angles on the walls. I got the feeling Stone spent more time eyeing the mirrors than the art. Furniture: black, square, and uninviting. The room looked staged, rather than lived in. A realtor’s imagination
for the wealthy bachelor.
Stone stepped behind a polished mahogany bar. Luke stood sentinel at the edge of the foyer, guarding the exit. I caught his eyes, then moved mine down to his broken nose, then onto his wounded leg, and back up again. I finished the trek with a thin smile, reminding him that I’d beaten him with my hands tied behind my back. Evened up, he’d go down quicker this time.
“Yes, you and Luke have an unpleasant history.” Stone’s voice pulled me out of the challenge. “Young men and testosterone have a long journey to reason.”
“I guess your son isn’t, yet, as reasonable as you.”
“Nothing gets past you, does it, Rick?” He shrugged his shoulders. “Well, I guess there’s no hiding one’s genes.”
But I knew the last week had been all about Stone keeping the genes belonging to the birth certificate hidden. I’d use that knowledge when I had him on the ropes. Right now, we were circling and sticking jabs.
“Drink?” He held up a bottle of Macallan.
“Eighteen-year-old or twenty-five?” I asked.
“Eighteen.” The same vintage I’d served him at Muldoon’s that first night with Melody.
“Pass.” I could use a drink, but scoring the minor point tasted better.
A genuine laugh escaped his mouth. “Really, after we conclude this small bit of business, you must come work for me.” He swept a hand around the expensively decorated, unlived-in room with a view. “Even with all this, amusement is rare.”
“I’ll think about it.” I glanced over at Luke and then back at his father. “Looks like you have good health coverage.”
A low growl rumbled from Luke behind me.
“Cradle to grave.” Stone poured himself a drink.
“Same go for your other employee, Stamp Heaton?” The tainted ex-cop with ties to Windsor, Melody, Scarface, and Stone. Linchpin to the whole sordid mess or bit player?
“Mr. Heaton is part time. We could work out something more permanent for you.” He took a sip of his Scotch. “Come. We’ll talk in my office.”