Tell No Lie, We Watched Her Die

by Richard Sanders

  L.C. waved the waitress over, ordered another Artois and a shot of Jack Daniels.

  “She wasn’t stupid about things,” he said. “People might think she was, but she wasn’t. She read, she kept informed, she loved discussing things, she loved talking about politics. She was very interested in politics. And, and she was keeping a diary while she was seeing that halitoxic bastard. Or, not a diary—not an every day. A journal. She kept a journal on her computer. I think what was in there was what got her killed.”

  “You ever see it?

  “No, it was her personal thoughts. But I know, you know, she kept it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She told me.”

  “You were that close?”

  L.C. looked away from me, out to the street. “If you only knew.”

  His drinks came. He attacked the Jack, chased it with a third of the beer and told me how he and Amanda were getting back together.

  No one was supposed to know it at the time. They didn’t want to announce it until everything was settled. But they were reconciling, reconnecting. He’d realized he needed to be with her, he was lost without her. He said she was the best thing that had happened to him since he’d left his mama’s womb.

  And she felt the same way about him. She was tired of the loneliness, getting high all the time. He hadn’t seen her in three, four days when she died, but they were definitely working things out between them, even thinking about getting remarried. She’d even bought a set of dishes for a new house, was shopping for bedroom furniture.

  “What about Robby Walsh?”

  “She was going to drop him,” L.C. said. “She was going to out-and-out dump his ass. She said there were things about him she didn’t like.”

  “Like what?”

  “She wouldn’t say. It was something she really didn’t want to talk about, but I think it was what he did time for, the corruption, whatever else he had locked in his shitbox. She wasn’t like I said stupid. I think she heard things, picked things up, pillow talk, whatever. I think that’s what she had in her journal.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I met a cop, a cop who was active in the investigation. He told me the night she died? They checked her computer. They checked her computer right away. There was no journal. It was gone. The thing disappeared the night she was killed.”

  “And you think Robby Walsh killed her to steal the journal.”

  “Probably not him himself. Probably some below-the-line people he hired. But for my money, yeah, he had the moral twerpitude to do it himself.”

  “You sure this isn’t paranoia?”

  “It’s not paranoia if something actually happened.”

  Our food came. L.C. ordered a double Jack.

  “You ever hear of Gerard Kimball?” he said. “Sgt. Gerard Kimball?”

  “No.”

  “He was the first LAPD officer to respond to her house. Bodyguard let him in, took him to the bedroom. He sees her sprawled facedown, naked, laying diagonally across the bed. Reports it in. So on and so on.

  “Few days later he runs into this photographer he knows, a paparazzo. Guy says to Gerard, I’ve got to tell you about something, but it’s totally in confidence. Gerard agrees. The photographer says that on the night she died, he got a call from this German magazine—magazine, website, whatever—he’d done work for before. This was a little after 11 that night, 11:15 the latest. They told him to get over to Amanda Eston’s house—she’s dead and they want him to shoot the story for them. He went, but by the time he got there the cops were all over the place. Except for the outside of the house, he couldn’t get any footage.

  “Next day, though, the photographer reads that the bodyguard didn’t find her until 11:47. So how—this is what he tells Gerard—how did this German magazine know she was dead at 11:15 the latest, a good half-hour before?”

  “Who was the photographer?

  “Gerard never told me the name. It was in confidence.”

  “So what did this Gerard do?”

  While we picked at our food, L.C. told me what happened next.

  >>>>>>

  Sgt. Gerard Kimball is completely twisted by the discrepancy in time. He presses the photographer on the hour. You sure it wasn’t after 12? No, the guy remembers watching The Daily Show live when he got the call—it had to be after 11. The guy’s also reluctant to give up the name of the German magazine, website, whatever. He doesn’t want to jeopardize an income source. But eventually he tells. Gerard finds out that the Germans got a call from an anonymous tipster just after 11 p.m. Pacific time, simply telling them that Amanda Eston had died. They aren’t able to trace the call back.

  Gerard starts questioning what’s going on, a process that will turn out to be long and tortuous.

  •Her remembers seeing her body, facedown, positioned diagonally across the bed, remembers seeing her right hand outstretched toward the cell phone on her nightstand. Like she was struggling, at the end, to make or take a call. He looks in the reports for her phone records, discovers that the FBI has already tracked all calls in and out that night. The last calls she made include two to Robby Walsh’s cell, one to his office, one to his house. Two calls came in, both from Walsh’s cell.

  •Maybe a week later, Gerard starts thinking he should make copies of the phone records for future reference. But when he goes back, they’re missing. Long-distance calls, the LUDS—they’ve just up and disappeared from the records. And nobody can say what happened. Huh? Gerard spends weeks trying to run them down, even calls the FBI, but nobody knows nothing. The records are officially lost.

  •A while later he makes a contact in the ME’s office. The woman in question tells him that Amanda’s body was in an advanced state of rigor mortis when it arrived at the hospital. Meaning she’d been dead for several hours, much earlier than the estimated TOD noted in the autopsy. Gerard is never able to nail this down, but in the course of asking he finds there’s a widespread rumor running through the department. Allegedly, the ME refused to sign off on the accidental-overdose ruling, but was pressured into it by his superiors.

  •Trying to put the patterns and links together, Gerard gets in touch with L.C. L.C. tells him about the missing journal. Gerard remembers the techies going through her computer at the scene. That’s exactly what they were looking for, something personal like a journal, but they couldn’t find a thing. Gerard double checks the old tech reports. No journal was ever located.

  •He starts going rogue, telling people in the media that the official ruling is bogus and that Amanda’s body should be exhumed and reexamined. LAPD brass tells him to shut the fuck up.

  •Gerard eventually comes up with a theory about what happened that night. Someone who knew Amanda, someone who had the keys to her house and who knew the alarm codes, had duplicate keys made. The keys and the code were given to someone else, possibly more than one person. That person or persons let themselves in the house that night, probably making sure she was asleep first. They held her down and inserted a pralicine enema in her rectum. Ingested in this manner, the drug works quickly. She would have struggled for only a minute, then gotten woozy as her breathing slowed. Her breathing would gradually decrease over the next 12-15 minutes, at which point she would be dead. This would allow plenty of time for the computer to be hacked and her journal removed. Then the intruder or intruders would exit, reset the alarm and lock the front door, leaving no evidence of a break-in. Amanda might still have a minute or so, just before she died, to try to use the phone.

  >>>>>>

  The afternoon sun was turning the ground into an oven. Traffic was stalling on Robertson, getting heavy. I saw a white refrigerated truck crawl past. NOBODY BEATS OUR MEAT.

  “I’d like to talk to Gerard Kimball. You know where he is?”

  “One of two places,” said L.C. “He called a press conference on his own, unauthorized. He was demanding, you can guess, that the investigation be formally reopened. I was there. I saw
it. Gerard walked up to the microphones, started talking about the gaps in the official ruling, the unanswered questions. About a minute into it, he coughed once—just once, one single cough—then he collapsed to the floor and stopped breathing. Everybody started running and screaming. There were, I don’t know, three or four people trying to give him CPR, which maybe wasn’t such a good thing. Any case, by the time the EMTs got there, he was dead. Huge heart attack. Monumental heart attack, although he’d never had any heart problems. No history whatsoever.”

  I waited a beat, waited for it.

  “You’re saying somebody killed him? You’re saying Robby Walsh killed him too?”

  L.C. gave a Sisyphus shrug. “I can’t prove a thing. I don’t know what that anger-banger did to Gerard. But sure as shit I know what he did to her. I know and I will never forgive. I know what that clammy scumbag did and I will never forget, and I know that someday somebody’s gonna cut through all this froo-frah-frah and make somebody tell the fucking truth.”

  “It could happen.”

  “And if not me—I ask you this—if not me, then who the fuck who? That’s why it’ll be me. They haven’t killed my energy—my energy is very, very big. I will do it. And when I say I, I means me.”

  Well, his energy might’ve been very, very big, but it suddenly seemed to drop off. He started staring at his empty Jack Daniels tumbler and he didn’t move. He was staring at the glass as if it had hypnotized him.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m okay,” he said slowly. “Just, sometimes, I get depressed by all this. Sometimes I think about what a disaster my life is since she’s been gone, how fuckered-up everything is. Sometimes I feel like I got electrodes stuck to my head, and these thoughts are being run through the night and into my skull, and once they get in there they start dilating and bloating until it feels like my head is going to crack open. I’m trying to do this, I’m trying to do this for her, sometimes I get so depressed light stops moving. I can see it. I can see the light molecules just slow down and stop moving.”

  The way L.C. was talking, the way he looked, he reminded me of a guy I’d once done a story on, a guy who was suing the state to get back into prison. Claimed his release was illegal, granted on faulty grounds, and should be reversed. Life outside was so bad, he said, he was desperate to get back inside.

  “I know you loved her,” I said, “I know what you’re trying to do, but you can’t let it warp your life.”

  L.C. laughed. “That’s what they all say. That’s what a lot of people say. But you know what? Show me somebody who’s gone through what I’ve gone through, who’s got the same ghosts I have, who’s pushed his thoughts to the edge, whose thoughts are splitting his fucking head apart, whose life has been turned into an utter fucking ruin, who’s lost without the person he loves, who loved somebody who had people leeching off her soul, who loved somebody who got ravaged and devoured and luminously chewed apart, and if he’s got the exact same loss that I have, the exact same, pound for pound, pain for pain, measure for measure, then let him tell me… Ah, shit, what am I talking about? I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.”

  His eyes lost their focus. He hunched over the table and lowered his head.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing sometimes,” he said. “You know? I just don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “You’re sitting here. You’re having lunch with me.”

  He nodded. He moved his head with the force of revelation. “Right, right. I’m sitting here. I’m having lunch with you.”

  >>>>>>

  BLACK PATENT LEATHER LACE-UP BOOTS

  I went back to the bureau, did some catch-up work. It helped me come down from L.C., absorb what he’d said. Later I had dinner with the bureau chief, JoEllen Sanchez. She wanted to talk about language, the way people sterilize and denude it these days. Especially the bureaucrats who run our company.

  “It just spins my head off,” JoEllen said. “A vacation is now an Extended Out-Of-Office Leave. An EOOOL. Overtime? An Accelerated Pro-Rated Incremental Payment. An APRIP.”

  She was right. Where does it end? Bums don’t pick up butts on the street anymore? They pick up pre-smoked cigarettes? PSCs?

  There was a message waiting for me back at the Chateau Marmont. The concierge handed me a hotel envelope, one of those old pink While-U-Were-Out slips. From: L.C. Martin. Message: Please meet him at his house. He has something to show you. Address: 317 Emory Road, in Santa Monica.

  Well why not? You can never get enough L.C. Martin in one day.

  I drove, thinking about a story I’d read recently. A gang of teens had gone wild in Santa Monica, driving through the streets and shooting up cars. But only expensive cars—Bentleys, Jaguars, BMWs. If you had a KIA, you were safe.

  No, there’s no class warfare in America.

  I found Emory Road, no problem, but the street confused me. It was a commercial drag. Nothing remotely residential about it. I saw tall buildings up ahead. Maybe L.C. lived in a condo? But the semi-scrapers turned out to be office buildings. No condos, co-ops or apartments. Just blocks of quiet, almost deserted darkness.

  Did whoever took the message get it wrong? Or was L.C. so far gone he couldn’t remember where he lived?

  There wasn’t even a 317 Emory Road. You had an office building at 315 and another at 319. Between them was the entrance to an open parking lot in the back.

  That’s where 317 should’ve been, right there. A neat non-existent fit.

  Very neat, in fact. It almost felt on purpose.

  I’m thinking, is this really a mistake? Or does crazy L.C. want me to see something in there?

  I pulled in. What the hell, I was already here. The parking lot, fenced in its back, spanned the two buildings. It had three entrances, the one I was using, the others running down the far sides of 315 and 319. Fifteen or 16 cars were scattered throughout, lit by the empty pink glow of sodium vapor lights.

  Could L.C. be waiting for me in one of the parked cars? I drove around the lot, scouted them out. Nobody inside any of them. Nothing here except a kind of jumpy static in the night.

  I looked at the two office buildings. Something in there? I parked my car and closed the door softly as I got out, I don’t know why, but it was like I didn’t want to disturb the atmosphere. There were a few lights on in each building, people working late. These are their cars.

  I started walking toward the closest building, 319, and halfway there I heard the sound of running in the middle entrance, the one I’d used. No, feet running, more than one person, voices, thick, the sounds echoing between the buildings.

  A Suburu Forester was parked 12 feet away from me. I ducked behind the side of the car, staying down enough to keep my eyes just above the lower edge of the windows.

  Two guys ran into the lot. Big guys, mostly meat. Each had what looked like a gun in his hand, each had his face covered with a gaily multicolored ski mask.

  Nah—no way this could be good.

  They stood for a second in the lot, then one of them said, “That’s him,” and they started running again. To the rental I was driving.

  Still crouching next to the Suburu, I took the Glock out.

  They looked at my rental, circled it, checked the inside, then looked up and around the rest of the lot.

  “Shit,” one of them said. “That way.”

  “No,” said the other. “That way.”

  They started moving toward 319, coming this way. I dropped to the ground and rolled under the Suburu. Better dirty than dead.

  All I could see now were their feet. One guy was wearing grubby work shoes. But the other, Jesus, he had on a pair of black patent leather lace-up boots, the surface gleaming in the pink parking lights.

  Where do you even buy these things?

  They went past the Suburu and over to 319, not going near the door but hugging close to the shadows by the wall. I saw them turn down the car entranceway on the far side of the building, heard their steps fade away as they ran t
oward the street.

  I didn’t move. I must’ve breathed but I don’t remember. Two entire minutes passed. No steps, no sounds, no movement in the shadows.

  I rolled out from underneath the Suburu and got to my feet. I was definitely getting that Robert Johnson feeling—time to move on, time to outrace the devil.

  Twenty feet from my rental I heard a harsh heel-scrape in the middle alley. My pulse jumped to my temples. A figure edged out of those shadows. He was shorter than the other guys. Squat, powerful build, also with a ski mask—slashes and diagonals of reds, yellows and blues—covering his face.

  I didn’t notice what shoes he was wearing because he had a gun in his hand big enough to cut a Lincoln Tunnel through my head.

  Total panic. A shit-volley of shots blew out as I ran, bullets spitting up cement splinters all around my legs. I dove for the rental and leveled my Glock on the hood. One shot. It caught him in the shoulder, spun him around and knocked him to the ground.

  I’d like to know who he was but the circumstances for an introduction didn’t seem right.

  I gunned the rental across the lot and swung into the alley on the far side of 315. Clear going for maybe three seconds until the first two ski-masked guys suddenly materialized in front of me, running in from the street. They saw me and raised their guns. I plowed straight at them, ramming the rental up another 40 or 50 miles per hour.