The Innocents Club

by Taylor Smith

  It was close quarters for homes in the million-dollar-and-up range, but like the real estate guys said—location, location, location. The Balboa peninsula was probably only a dozen or so miles as the crow files from Scheiber’s own new home in suburban Laguna Hills, but each time he drove out onto this long spit, with the Pacific Ocean on one side and Newport Harbor on the other, he felt the subtle change in the air that came from moving from one distinct ecological zone to another.

  The smell of the salt water and the lazy heat had him yearning for his Baja honeymoon. One sweet week in Rosarita—not nearly long enough. But after agreeing to keep Lucas for two weeks, the boy’s father had announced at the last minute that the bimbo he’d married had surprised him with tickets to Venice. And no, it wouldn’t be convenient to change their plans. Lucas had ended up staying with Liz’s mother, but she was sixty-five, and there was a limit to how long she could cope with his high-energy needs.

  They’d cut the honeymoon in half. Back on the job only two days now, Scheiber felt as if he’d never left.

  As always when a rare call like a 929–D, discovery of a dead body, went out, every cop on the shift had contrived to show up and take a gander. Anything to relieve the tedium of cruising quiet, tidy streets, reassuring the good Newport citizens that their exorbitant tax dollars were hard at work. A surplus half-dozen cops were milling around by the victim’s garage. Scheiber spotted a couple more on the roof overhead, enjoying the novelty of the situation. On his own first LAPD beat, he recalled, he’d stopped counting corpses after his first month.

  At the yellow perimeter tape, he nodded to an officer standing guard over the scene. The black-uniformed cop nodded back, but when Scheiber ducked to pass under, a beefy arm blocked his path.

  “Ah, excuse me? You can’t go in there.”

  Scheiber sighed. Fair enough. He was dressed in street clothes—a sport coat and open-necked shirt—and although he was a one-man Homicide Division, he hadn’t been on the job long enough to have met every single one of the uniforms, or for them all to recognize him. His ride was also unmarked. On the other hand, who but a cop ever drove a Chevy Caprice?

  “Scheiber,” he said, pulling out his badge.

  “Oops. Sorry about that, Detective.” The young cop lifted the tape to let him through.

  “No problem.” Scheiber glanced at the acetate name badge on the lapel of the man’s short-sleeved shirt. “Cathcart?”

  “Ken Cathcart, yeah.”

  “Good to meet you. Were you first on the scene?”

  “No, that’d be Sergeant Livermore. He’s upstairs.”

  “Who called it in?”

  “I think it was a neighbor. Livermore would know for sure.”

  “Okay. See if you can get some of these other guys to block off both ends of the alley, would you? Residents with ID only in and out. The coroner’s people will be showing up eventually, and they’ll need to get their van in.” Scheiber glanced at the craning heads on the other side of the tape. “Let’s try to move this bunch back, too. Any of ‘em see anything?”

  “What? Like, pertaining to the DOA?”

  “Yeah. Anybody talk to ‘em?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Livermore said the old guy croaked in the hot tub. He figured it was a heart attack, so—”

  “Yeah, well, let’s get a couple of guys talking to these folks, anyway, just in case. Find out if anybody noticed anything out of the ordinary recently.”

  “I’ll get right on it.”

  “Thanks very much. I’ll check back after I’ve had a look around inside. What’s the best way in?”

  “Side door of the garage is open. Spa’s on the deck, up on the roof above us here. Just off the master bedroom.”

  “Got it.”

  Scheiber pulled off his shades as he entered the dim garage, pausing briefly to admire the silver-gray Jaguar parked inside. It was an older model, from before the Ford buyout of the company—notoriously unreliable, but sleek as an Arabian thoroughbred. The new models were thoroughbreds crossed with good American quarter-horse stock—solid and steady, but lacking in allure.

  After his divorce, Scheiber had bought himself an old Corvette. His enthusiasm for the two-seater, his ex had announced, was a symptom of complete reversion to juvenile irresponsibility. She’d also noted the male preoccupation with speed and power as a substitute for virility. Scheiber regretted every penny he’d spent on tuition so she could finish that psychology degree of hers.

  The door into the house was cracked open. From force of habit, he elbowed his way into a laundry room, taking care not to touch anything. He passed through into a kitchen that was small but well appointed, with stainless-steel appliances, buttery maple cabinets and buff-colored granite countertops.

  The house looked at least thirty years old, so this was obviously a renovation job, he decided, and expensively done, at that. Blue and yellow accessories—hand-painted dishes mounted on plate holders, a collection of cobalt-blue bottles in glass-fronted cabinets—indicated a woman’s hand in the decoration. But the faint smell of cigars and the clutter on the counter—junk mail, keys and a mound of spare change—suggested a bachelor life-style. A pile of newspapers was spilling off one of the bar stools. The New York Times. Guy was not a local. But then, few people were.

  A patrolman rounded a corner from the next room. This guy Scheiber knew. Alan Livermore, carrot-topped, freckled, young for the sergeant’s stripes on his black sleeve. Cocky. Determined to make detective, and still pissed that an outsider had been parachuted into the department’s sole, coveted homicide position.

  A fat, shining black tomcat was following closely at the sergeant’s heels, but when he saw Scheiber, the cat hesitated, looking from one man to the other. The animal’s experience to date with Livermore must have made up his mind, because he ran to Scheiber, yowling and circling his legs, looking for sympathy.

  “Hey, puss. What’s up?” Scheiber bent to scratch his ears, but the cat pulled back, holding himself just out of reach. Whatever he was after, it wasn’t affection.

  “He’s hungry,” Livermore said. “Complaining to anyone who’ll listen. That’s what alerted the neighbor.”

  “The one who called in the body?”

  “Uh-huh. Lives next door. Went out around six to walk his dog, says he heard the cat yowling. When he came back from his walk, cat was still at it. Something about it didn’t feel right, he said, so he came to the patio door to have a look. Apparently the cat was going crazy inside.”

  Scheiber had pulled a notebook out of his pocket. “Did he come in?”

  “Yeah. Said he saw Korman working in the yard yesterday and he wasn’t looking too hot. Got worried when he saw the old guy wasn’t doing anything about the cat.”

  “Korman. That’s the dead guy?”

  Livermore pulled out a notebook of his own and consulted it. “Albert Jacob Korman. Seventy-seven, according to the driver’s license I found in his wallet.”

  “And the neighbor?” Scheiber said.

  “Porter. Douglas Porter.” Livermore lifted a hand and let it flop limp-wristed. “A real thweetie, you know? Thaid he was terribly, terribly contherned about the poor old fellow.”

  Scheiber ignored the exaggerated lisp. “So how did Porter get in?”

  “He said he knocked at the patio door and rang the bell. When nobody answered, he walked around to the side yard, found the garage door open.”

  “Was it actually open, or just unlocked?”

  Livermore hesitated, looking defensive. “He said ‘open.”’

  The cat was becoming really irksome, crying and insinuating himself around and between Scheiber’s legs. “Let’s see what we can do about feeding this guy.”

  He pulled a pair of latex gloves from the pocket of his sport coat. As he made a quick circuit of the kitchen, the cat stuck close by him, meowing at every step. A pantry next to the refrigerator yielded a tall stack of cat-food tins. Scheiber handed one to Livermore, nodding to the empty dis
h on the floor mat next to a water bowl.

  “Could you do this?”

  Livermore took the tin with a grimace. As he popped the top and shook the food out into the dish, Scheiber opened the fridge. Sparsely stocked—a little cheese, a couple of pots of yogurt, a carton of orange juice. No tidy, Tupperware-stored leftovers. Several bottles of Heineken and Guinness on the door, plus some soda and tonic water. Two shriveled limes in the crisper. An unopened package of bacon and some loosely wrapped cold cuts in the meat compartment.

  The kitchen was well-appointed, but the fridge belonged to someone who wasn’t much of a cook. Scheiber closed the door and moved on. There was a six-burner gas cooktop set into the granite counter, but the range hood over it held a good week’s worth of dust. A single coffee mug and a water-spotted blue plate sat on the sink board, probably rinsed fast and left to drain. The dishwasher was empty.

  Livermore dropped the food dish back on the mat, and the cat dived at it. “Jesus! You’d think he hadn’t been fed in a month.”

  “Only if you’ve never lived with cats,” Scheiber said, remembering his daughter’s twin calicos and their chronic short-term memory deficit where their last meal was concerned. “They’ve got a special talent for embarrassing their owners with this pathetic neglected routine. This guy could have been fed two hours or two days ago.”

  Livermore’s foot was poised over the pedal on the trash can.

  “Better leave the tin on the counter for now,” Scheiber said. “We may have to go through there.”

  “Through his garbage? What for? The guy had a heart attack. Or stroked out, maybe. There’s no sign of foul play.”

  “Yeah, well, until we know for sure, we treat it like a crime scene. If the side door was open, somebody could’ve slipped in. Wouldn’t be the first time a homeowner had been done in by a burglar surprised in the act.”

  “Uh-uh,” Livermore said, frizzled red head shaking. “I found his wallet in a dresser drawer upstairs. Nearly two hundred bucks in it.”

  “Yeah, well—or not,” Scheiber conceded. “Still, until we’ve got a firm cause of death, best not to muck up a scene.” It was meant as a reminder to Livermore that his job was to secure the site, not paw over evidence. “I’m going to take a look upstairs. Where’s the neighbor now?”

  Livermore cocked a thumb over his shoulder. “I sent him home. Told him somebody would be over later to talk to him. Not me, if you don’t mind. Guy hovers just a little too close for my taste, you know?”

  His shudder was overdone. Scheiber was pretty sure Allison’s psychology textbooks would have had something to say about the latent tendencies of your average rabid homo-phobe.

  “The guys outside are supposed to be moving the looky-loos back and clearing the street for the coroner,” he told Livermore. “We also need to find out if anyone noticed anything unusual going on the last day or so.”

  The cat-food tin clattered on the granite counter as the young sergeant made a beeline for the garage. “I’ll get that organized,” he said, obviously eager to be at a task more suited to his management skills.

  “You do that, thanks.”

  Watching Livermore straight-arm the door, Scheiber winced, but he held his tongue. He was the new man in the department, and he wasn’t going to earn any allies by throwing his weight around just yet. He made a mental note, however, to watch out for contaminating prints if they ended up having to dust the place.

  He headed for the front of the house. It, too, looked as if it had undergone extensive remodeling. The bar that defined the boundary of the kitchen overlooked a dining area, which flowed into a large living room. The far side of the room was entirely lined with French doors. The interior plan was airy and modern—almond walls, open-beam ceilings and polished hardwood floors scattered with expensive-looking Persian carpets and good furniture.

  Scheiber walked over to the French doors. The sun was streaming in through the small-paned windows. The bricked courtyard outside was filled with flowers in pots and planters. Beyond the walkway on the other side of the low, white picket fence, sailboats anchored in Newport Harbor bobbed on the morning tide, their masts oscillating like upturned pendulums.

  “Hey! Jimbo! What’s keeping you, man?”

  Scheiber turned back to the circular wooden staircase in the center of the house. It rose to an overhead loft area, and Dave Eckert was grinning down at him from the long balustrade that lined it.

  “I saw your car pull up ten minutes ago. Waddya been doing?” Eckert was dressed in a black polo shirt and khakis, his thirty-five millimeter Nikon slung around his neck, the department’s Polaroid in his hand.

  Scheiber started up the twisting stairs, feeling every one of his forty-four years with each step. “Oh, you know, getting a feel for the place and the victim. Feeding the damn cat. The guy lived alone, I gather?”

  “Yeah. Apparently he was a widower.”

  Scheiber paused at the top of the stairs.

  “You out of breath there, old fella?” Eckert asked, grinning. “Honeymoon really wore you out, did it?”

  Scheiber scowled. “I’ll ‘old fella’ you. And turn that damn cap around, will you? You look like some gangstarapping homey.”

  He flicked Eckert’s black NBPD cap, which he was wearing backward, as always. It rarely left his head. A civilian member of the force, Eckert had been a professional photographer before falling into a second career as a crime-scene investigator. He was a tad insecure, Scheiber suspected, about not being part of the police academy brotherhood. Or, who knew? Maybe the cap was a fashion statement—a bid to camouflage the male pattern baldness that aged him beyond his thirty-odd years.

  “It’s functional,” Eckert said. “Brim gets in the way of the camera and screws up my light meter.”

  “Yeah, right. Screws up that case of terminal coolness you’re workin’ on, too.”

  Eckert grinned. “Eat your heart out, old-timer. Come on. The body’s through here.”

  Scheiber followed him down the hall, pausing briefly at the door of what looked to be a large office. The walls were lined with heavily loaded walnut bookcases, and a large desk in the center of the room was covered with papers and thick documents.

  “Livermore told me this guy was seventy-seven years old,” he said. “Aren’t most guys retired by then?”

  “I sure plan to be.”

  “So what was this Korman doing here?”

  “I think the neighbor said he was an agent of some kind.”

  “Agent. Like, a Hollywood agent?” Scheiber wondered, stepping into the office. “So, would these be movie scripts, then?” His latex-covered fingers turned around the top sheet from one of the fat piles. “A Time for Every Purpose,” he read, “A Novel by P. K. Lester.”

  “A book agent?” Eckert ventured.

  “Yeah, must be.” Scheiber turned the page back the way he’d found it.

  The wall around the windows, the one wall of the room not covered in floor-to-ceiling shelves, featured dozens of framed photographs of people in various sizes of groups and various kinds of settings, most of them involving raised glasses. One man appeared more often than anyone else, someone’s arms invariably draping his shoulders, or his theirs, as they beamed at the camera. Must be Korman, Scheiber decided, maybe with some of his more famous clients. Not that he recognized anyone. Unlike movie stars, writers seemed to be a pretty anonymous-looking bunch.

  He turned back to Eckert. “Okay, lead on, Macduff.”

  They headed back down the hall toward the master bedroom. The room was nicely decorated in creams and yellows and blues, but, like the downstairs, it was a little cluttered, a little dusty. If he had to guess, Scheiber would bet Mr. Korman had a cleaner in every other week. Often enough that things didn’t get too out of hand, but not so often for someone to get underfoot. By the look of things, the place was due for another visit any day now.

  The covers of the bed had been pulled up in a halfhearted effort, but reading material overflowed the ni
ght tables. Several items of clothing had missed the laundry hamper in the corner and lay scattered across the deep blue carpeted floor. On one of the night tables, next to a water jug and glass, he spotted a brown plastic vial.

  “The label says Dalmane,” Eckert said, following his gaze. “Do you have any idea what that is?”

  “Sleeping pills, I think.”

  “Uh-oh!” Eckert lined himself up in front of the table and took a couple of close-up shots of the vial, once with the Polaroid, once with the Nikon. “Maybe our guy didn’t have a heart attack, after all. He was drinking, too.”

  Scheiber noticed the half-empty bottle of Glenlivet on another table. He peered closer at the pills. “It’s a good theory, but I don’t know about it in this case. The container looks pretty full. Most suicides who go the pills-and-booze route don’t leave anything to chance. They down ‘em all. Could be grounds for an accidental mishap ruling though, if he took one or two, and then fell asleep in the tub. We’ll have to make sure the lab does a thorough tox screening.”

  He turned and walked out to the deck, Eckert trailing close behind. Squinting in the brilliant sunshine, Scheiber nodded at the officers standing guard over the redwood spa and pulled his sunglasses out of his pocket.

  “The jets on the spa were still running when I got here,” Eckert said. “I took a couple of shots and then turned ‘em off so we could see the body better.”

  Scheiber peered over the edge of the tub. The old man lay on his side, curled up in a ball, just as Eckert had said on the phone. The lower elbow was bent, the arm tucked back under his head. Eyes closed, he looked as if he was asleep on the molded gray plastic floor. His hair was very sparse, clipped short around the ears but long on top, so it floated like white seaweed around his face. His scalp was shiny and bare. Must have worn a comb-over. Resist that option when the time comes, Scheiber reminded himself. Whatever anyone’s vanity might say, it fooled no one.

  “You said the jets were on?” he asked Eckert. “Aren’t these things on timers?”