There was a second chair and a second man. He was in his mid-sixties, silver-haired, impeccably dressed, and noticeably handsome. He looked like a Hollywood star. In a way, he was.
'Guys, thanks for coming,' Tony said. 'This is my friend, my mentor, and most important, my shrink, Ford Jameson.'
Dr Ford Jameson, legendary psychiatrist to the rich and crazy, smiled, stood up, and shook our hands. He was tall and trim, with the kind of warm, caring eyes you want in a TV dad, or a therapist you're going to trust with your innermost secrets.
'Nice to finally meet you,' I said. 'Tony's told us a lot about you.'
'The question is,' Terry said, 'has he told you a lot about us?'
The doc laughed. 'I can't break doctor-patient confidentiality,' he said, 'but I'll go out on a limb and say that based on what I've heard about you, Detective Biggs, I wouldn't want to go up against you in a poker game.'
We all laughed at that one, then the room grew uncomfortably quiet, and I was reminded that this was as much a condolence call to a friend as it was a police investigation.
'Tony,' I said, breaking the silence, 'we can't tell you how sorry we feel about Marisol.'
'Yeah,' Terry said. 'We were looking at Sorensen, and we only wish we could have—'
Tony held up his good right hand. 'Stop. I've been blaming myself for Marisol's death, and Ford has just spent the last half hour helping me understand that she was a strong woman who made her own choices. What happened is not my fault, and God knows, it's not yours.'
'Gentlemen,' Jameson said, 'survivor's guilt is incredibly common in situations like this. If either or both of you would like to spend some time talking it through with me, I'd be glad to help. There's never a charge for LAPD.'
'We appreciate it,' I said.
'Thanks,' Terry said. 'At those prices, I'd like to bring my sixteen-year-old daughter and leave her with you till she's forty.'
Jameson laughed again and handed each of us a business card. 'Anytime. I mean it.'
'Anytime but now,' Tony said. 'We were in the middle of a therapy session. Can you guys give us a half hour?'
'No problem,' I said. 'We'll stop in and see Charlie.'
'He's downstairs,' Tony said, sweeping his hand across his outrageously expensive hospital suite, in the poor people's wing.'
That, of course, got another laugh all around.
We didn't know it at the time, but as it turned out, Charlie Knoll was not quite as poor as we all thought.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Charlie was in bed reading the LA Times.
'There's half a dozen different stories about us in the paper, and we're all over the TV,' he said. 'How much of this shit is the truth?'
'Which part don't you believe?' I said.
'All of it. Last Sunday the five of us were on the boat drinking beer and playing cards. A week later two of us are in the hospital, three wives and my mother-in-law are dead, and a guy I knew and trusted turns out to be a maniac serial killer. How did this all happen?'
'Charlie, if you're looking for someone to blame, I'll own a lot of it,' Terry said.
'Thank you, Detective Martyr, but I'm not looking to point the finger. I just can't believe that bastard killed four women. It's surreal.'
'Still, it was our job to catch him, and we didn't.'
'You guys did what you could do,' Charlie said. 'And if you ask me, nobody caught him. Tony brought him down, but not through brilliant detective work. He just showed up at the right place at the right time.'
'Almost the right time,' Terry said. 'Five minutes earlier and Marisol would still be alive.'
'Did you visit him in his lah-dee-fucking-dah suite?'
'Yeah, but we have to go back,' I said. 'He's with his shrink. Speaking of which, how's your mental health?'
'Oh, you know that five-stages-of-grief thing - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I'm stuck at extremely pissed off.'
'Dr Jameson treats cops for free,' Terry said.
'No thanks. I'm allergic to shrinks,' Charlie said. 'They mess with your head. What I really need is a doc who will release me from this place. They did an echocardiogram, and they didn't like what they saw. So then they did a stress test, and they gave me some shit about a problem with my left main coronary artery. You know what the cardiologist calls the left main? The widowmaker. I told him it's too late for me to die and leave a widow. He wants to do an angiogram tomorrow. I told him he better keep me alive, because I've got funerals to plan.'
'Did you know that Martin Sorensen claimed to be the brains behind the house-flipping concept?' I said.
'It's true,' Charlie said. 'Julia told me a few years ago when the whole thing started. But I never thought about it as a motive. I figured Nora was paying him well.'
'He told us he was planning to write a book about his relationship with Nora,' Terry said.
'Good for him,' Charlie said, not sounding particularly impressed. 'He'd make some money on it, but it's a dead end, a one-book deal. No, I don't think writing a tell-all book about Nora was the motive. Now that I have the benefit of hindsight, I think I know what Martin was really planning.'
Terry and I exchanged a look.
'Charlie,' I said, 'there is a big blank section in the final report we're writing. If you actually know what Martin was planning, that would go a long way to filling that hole.'
'I'll give it a try.'
'Go ahead.'
'I think Martin was planning to become Nora Bannister.'
'Meaning what?' I said.
'I told you - me and Martin, we'd sometimes go out for a couple of pops together.'
'Yeah.'
'Well, one night, maybe a year ago, we're both at a bar, a little shit-faced, and we're talking about plan B. Martin asks what am I gonna do when I retire from the force. I have no idea. I mean, Reggie's gonna make fishing rods, or maybe open a bait and tackle shop, and get as far away from LA as he can. Me, I haven't even thought about it. So I ask Martin what's he gonna do. He says when Nora is ready to pack it in, he could easily take over writing her books.'
'How?'
'It's not that complicated,' Charlie said. 'There are plenty of writers whose estates are still churning out books. Ian Fleming has been dead for about forty years, but James Bond lives on with new stuff all the time.'
'And Martin thought he could write Nora's books?'
'By now, I could probably write them.' He laughed. 'Maybe not, but hell, a guy as smart as Martin could crack the code.'
'But even if Martin wrote them,' I said, 'wouldn't the money go to Nora's estate?'
'The estate would get the bulk of the dough, but with Julia gone, the university would be the executor. If you were them, who would you turn to for help in managing all of Nora's intellectual property?'
'The guy who worked with her for the past seven years,' I said.
'No question. Martin could literally take over Nora's ideas, her books, her life. He could make a ton of money for the university, plus he'd get paid as the writer, which would be a hell of a lot more than he made as an assistant.' Charlie smiled. 'Plus he'd be banging a lot younger broads.'
'It makes sense,' Terry said. 'But...'
'But what?'
'He killed Nora so he could take over her books. He killed Julia so she wouldn't stand in his way. But why did he bother to kill Jo and Marisol?'
'For the same reason he would have killed your wife next,' Charlie said. 'Everybody was cashing in on Martin's real estate idea but him. This was payback time.
Get rid of all five partners, and he'd have the house- flipping business all to himself.'
Terry exhaled loudly. 'Whoa.'
'Not pretty,' Charlie said, 'but what goes on inside the head of a mass murderer is never pretty.'
'Charlie, this has been a big help,' I said. 'Thanks.'
He shrugged. 'It would have been a bigger help if I'd have figured this all out after Jo Drabyak got killed. But I gotta tell you, Martin Sorensen wa
sn't even on my radar. I really liked the guy.'
'How much time are you going to take off before you come back to work?' I said. 'I only took a few weeks when Joanie died. I probably should have taken more. I was totally useless the first month or so.'
'Not totally useless,' Terry said. 'But a lot more useless than usual.'
'Fellas,' Charlie said, 'I'm not going back to work.'
'It's too soon to make a decision like that,' I said. 'Take some time...'
'Mike, I'm turning in my tin. So is Reggie. We talked about it.'
'What are you gonna do?' Terry said.
'Fish.'
'You?'
'Not off the Santa Monica pier, for Christ's sake. Reggie and I are going to sail around the world.'
'In a houseboat?'
'He's going to upgrade to a sailboat. Reg has been planning for years to chase the big ones down in Australia,
Japan, the South Pacific. He was going to go with Jo once he got his twenty. But with her dead, he's not waiting, and he's going with me.'
'You and Reggie?' Terry said.
'You think you and Mike are the only happy couple living together?' Charlie said. 'So, yeah, me and Reggie. We're friends. We're both going through the same shit. I wasn't sure at first, but I thought about it, and I decided that catching fish can be a lot more fun than catching scumbags.'
'You and Reggie are both gonna chuck your pensions?' I said.
'I got a little money to keep me afloat for a while. And you know Reg. He's a saver, and he's got that side business making fishing rods and selling them online.'
'What about that very understanding, very sympathetic, very compassionate friend you were with the other night?' Terry said. 'You got a rod for her, or does she stay behind?'
'Jesus, Biggs, you never let anything go, do you?' Charlie said. 'That part of my life is none of your goddam business.'
'I'm sorry,' Terry said. 'I had to ask.'
Charlie laughed. 'No you're not, and no you didn't. But if anybody would have the balls to ask, it would be you.'
'When are you and Reggie leaving?' I said.
'The funerals are Thursday. It'll take a few days to process me out of the department. Then I'll put the house on the market. Hopefully, we can leave by November and spend Christmas on the Great Barrier Reef.' 'We'll miss you,' I said. 'Send us a postcard.' 'Even better,' Terry said, 'send us a fish.'
Chapter Forty
We still had time to kill before going back to see Tony, so we went downstairs to the cafeteria. The place was basically deserted. I got a container of orange juice and a bagel. Terry bought coffee. We sat as far away from the counter people as possible.
'Charlie and Reggie?' Terry said. 'Sailing around the world? Catching fish? You were a little nuts when Joanie died, but these guys have taken it to a new level.'
'I was braced for Joanie's death. For these guys it came out of the blue. I guess they just really want to get away from it all.'
'Not to sound like a detective, but since that's what they pay me for, I've got a question. Don't you think it's sounds a little - I don't know - suspicious?'
'You mean the fact that they're both leaving town?'
'Town? Mike, they're leaving the fucking hemisphere. Does that set off any alarm bells in your head?'
'Like what?'
'I don't want to pollute your mind with what I'm thinking about. Just free associate and see where it takes you.'
I gnawed on my bagel. 'Well, if Charlie and Reggie were a man and a woman, and both their spouses were murdered, and suddenly they announced that they're going to sail off into the sunset, I'd think they're having an affair and they were involved in the murders. But they're two men.'
'And two men can't have an affair? Catch a movie, Mike. They have gay cowboys now. I hate to break it to you, but there are cops who like to ride bareback too. For all we know, Charlie's compassionate, understanding friend could turn out to be Reggie.'
'That's brilliant,' I said. 'Why didn't I think of it? Two married men we've known for years are suddenly struck gay. They don't know how to deal with it, so they murder their wives, and go sailing off to Australia. You're grabbing at straws - Charlie and Reggie are not gay.'
'Is that your final answer?'
'Even if they were,' I said, 'Charlie is sooooo not Reggie's type.'
We both laughed hard enough to get the handful of people who were in the cafeteria to look up.
'OK, let's assume they're not gay,' Terry said. 'Look at the money angle. With all this publicity, the price of the flip house is going sky-high, and they each stand to inherit their wife's cut.'
'I don't know how much money is involved, but it doesn't seem like enough to murder your wife. How much would it take for you to kill Marilyn?'
'There are days when I'd do it for twenty bucks and a six-pack of Heineken, but stop giving me straight lines. What if it's the money, plus something else?'
'Something else like what?'
'I don't know. They each have a mistress...or...'
'Look, Terry, I know what you're trying to do. Even if you can't figure out their motive, this news about the two of them retiring in a hurry and moving to the other side of the world makes it look like they were involved. But let's look at the facts. We know they didn't kill Marisol. Martin did.'
'And Martin probably killed the others,' he said. 'But what if Reggie and Charlie paid him to do it? They knew he wanted to take over Nora's empire, so they came up with a plan to...'
He stopped, and let out a long slow breath. Then he gulped down several swallows of his coffee.
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. I don't even know why I went off like this.'
'I know why,' I said.
He leant back in his chair. You don't have to be a student of body language to understand what that means.
'You want me to tell you?' I said.
He held up one hand, shook his head no, and finished off his coffee. Then he folded his arms across his chest, and still sitting far back in his chair he said, 'Fine. Go ahead, tell me.'
'Guilt,' I said. 'Good old-fashioned, lapsed-Catholic guilt. You've been beating up on yourself that we didn't solve this sooner. You feel bad about Nora and Julia, but you're totally devastated about Marisol. We were starting to like Martin for these murders, but we didn't get to him fast enough.'
I've known Terry a long time. I'm one of the privileged few who occasionally gets to see his serious side. This was one of those rare occasions. He was staring at me, not thinking ahead to the next joke, but listening hard.
'Go on,' he said.
'The reality is that his next victim was Marisol, but in your mind, it wasn't.' I paused for a few seconds. He knew what I was going to say next. 'It was Marilyn.'
'Could have been,' he said softly. 'It was just luck of the draw.'
'I don't think it was luck. I think Marisol made herself an easier target than Marilyn did.'
'We'll never know.'
'Maybe...just maybe,' I said, 'if we had been more aggressive, we could have nailed Martin before he killed Marisol, and that's hard for you to deal with. But if you turn this into something bigger and more complicated, then whatever we did won't matter. I think you're trying to make the guilt go away by changing the case into something we couldn't have solved.'
'Wow.'
'Here's the bottom line,' I said. 'Martin Sorensen killed Tony's wife, not yours. And it is not your fault. Now get past it.'
He unfolded his arms, reached across the table, and tore off a piece of my bagel. He chewed on it, and we just sat there quietly. Finally, he smiled.
'You're scary good at this analysis shit,' he said. 'Thanks.'
'Anytime,' I said. 'There's never a charge for LAPD.'
Chapter Forty-One
Tony was still sitting in the leather armchair, his feet propped up on an ottoman. 'How's Charlie holding up?' he asked.
'They're keeping him another day for some tests,'
I said. 'You up for answering a few questions?'
is this an official visit? I've got enough painkillers in me to make my answers qualify as somewhere between stupid and unreliable.'
it won't be as invasive as the one you're going to have to go through with IA, or as mind-numbing as the one you'll do with the department shrink,' I said, 'but we do need some answers, so we can fill in the blanks on our report. If you're too doped up we can come back.'
'No. Even if my shoulder wasn't killing me, the subject is so painful, I'm glad I'm on the drugs.'
'What happened yesterday morning?' I said. 'You both knew she could be a target. How did she happen to be alone in the house with the killer?'
'Dr Jameson made me promise I would do this interview without blaming myself,' he said. 'So I won't, but you can draw your own conclusions.'
He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. We waited for him to refocus and get to the facts.
'I went out for a run about six thirty. Marisol was still in bed. When I got back she was showered, dressed, and on her way out the door. I asked where the hell she's going by herself, and she said, "The flip house - the same place I go to every day, and I don't need a police escort.'"
'Did you ask why she was going?' I said. 'Do you know if she was planning to meet Martin?'
'Marisol doesn't deal well with questions about where she's been and what she's done. Whenever I ask, she backs off like I'm grilling her.'
'So you offered to go with her, and she said no.'
'Yeah, but I told her she didn't have a choice. She turned down police protection from Kilcullen, but she couldn't turn it down from me. I told her to sit tight while I shower, and we'll go together. She says, "Fine, just move your ass.'" He smiled. 'I loved her, but she could be a real bitch.'
'So I went upstairs to take a quick shower. I'm stripping down, and my cell rings. It's Ford - Dr Jameson. We had talked the day before, and I had told him all about the first three murders. He knew I was worried about Marisol, and he also knew that she would rather walk through South
Flipping Out Page 13