Killer Swell nb-1

by Jeff Shelby

  “That’s not enough, Liz, and you know it,” I said. “You knew it before you said it.”

  She looked at me for a moment, and I thought maybe she was going to tell me what I was missing. But it passed quickly, replaced by an expression that said she knew better than I did.

  “Noah, whatever you’re doing,” she told me, walking by me toward the house, “don’t. Because as good as you think you are, Costilla is better at being bad. Much better.”

  I heard the front door close. One of the seagulls gave up the fight for the bun, flew toward me, and landed on the wall, his beady eyes bearing down on me.

  No one was on my side.

  18

  Kate’s service wasn’t that different from other funerals that I’d been to. All Hallows Catholic Church sits atop Mount Soledad, overlooking the La Jolla shoreline, but even the view couldn’t change why we were there. Lots of flowers and crying, and everyone wishing they were someplace else.

  The one exception was that her husband threatened to rip my head off.

  The service had ended, and Carter and I were out in the courtyard next to the church, watching the Criers receive condolences from friends and family. I hadn’t wanted to come. Not that anyone ever wants to attend a funeral, but Kate’s death felt too close. I wasn’t ready to bury her. But I realized that if I was going to figure out what had happened to her, I was going to have to get used to doing things I wasn’t ready to do.

  “They look wrecked,” Carter said, watching Marilyn and Ken nod and shake hands.

  “Yeah.”

  “You gonna talk to them?”

  I shook my head. “Not here. They’ve got enough to deal with today.”

  Carter nodded in agreement. “Yeah. I don’t think Marilyn would care to see me anyway.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “Was the last time you saw her…”

  “Yep.”

  “The whole I-jump-farther-”

  “-if-I’m-naked episode,” Carter confirmed.

  The week before Kate and I broke up, Kate’s older sister, Emily, was home from UCLA with some friends having a party. The UCLA coeds had immediately taken to Carter, and he’d responded in kind. They’d dared him to jump off the roof of the Criers’ house into the pool. He’d claimed he could only do it naked because he jumped farther without any clothes on.

  Unfortunately, Marilyn Crier had walked out onto the patio just in time to see Carter soar over her into her pool. Naked.

  “An unforgettable performance,” I said.

  “Legendary,” he said. Then he tilted his head. “Hey. Didn’t you and Emily-”

  “Shut up,” I said, cutting him off.

  Almost as if she’d heard us, Emily Crier emerged from a group of people near her parents and came toward us.

  “Noah,” she said, a tired smile forcing its way onto her face. “It’s good to see you.”

  We hugged briefly, and I was surprised by how little she’d changed. Slightly taller than Kate, she was still model thin. Her blond hair looked yellow in the sunlight, cut slightly above her shoulders. Soft brown eyes. She wore a black sundress with expensive-looking black heels. Put a bikini on her and she could’ve been back cheering for Carter in the pool that night.

  She put a hand on Carter’s arm. “You are still…huge.”

  Normally, he would have had at least fourteen responses to that statement, most of them obnoxious and funny. But maybe the most startling thing about Carter could be his sense of civility.

  He nodded. “Good to see you, Em.”

  She returned the nod, and an awkward pause engulfed the three of us like a bubble.

  “I’m sorry, Emily,” I said finally. “I really am.”

  “Thank you,” she said, shading her eyes from the sun. “It’s…I don’t know.”

  She looked around the courtyard for a moment, watching her parents shake more hands. She kept snapping the fingers of her left hand softly, trying to burn the nervous uncomfortable energy that comes from losing someone close to you.

  She turned back to me. “Dad hired you, I hear.”

  “He did. After your mother hired me.”

  She laughed and shook her head. “That is a partnership I never would’ve bet on.”

  I watched her father, forcing a smile as he hugged an older woman. “Me either.”

  “Was Mom a complete bitch to you?”

  “Not complete. Partial, maybe.”

  She groaned. “I doubt that.”

  “Which one’s Randall?” Carter asked, scanning the crowd.

  Emily spotted Kate’s husband first. “Over there. Tall, handsome.” She paused and the finger snapping came to a halt. “Huge bastard.”

  I recognized Randall speaking with two other men.

  “He’s not so tall,” Carter observed.

  “Bastard?” I asked, surprised by Emily’s comment. “You don’t like your brother-in-law?”

  Her stare was still locked on Randall. “Have you met him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did you think?”

  I glanced at Carter, but he was looking at Randall, too. “Seemed alright.”

  Emily turned to me, the soft brown eyes now hard as slate. “He’s a prick, Noah.”

  Her face flushed, her anger gathering itself. “Phony two-faced prick. He didn’t love Kate.”

  “How do you know?”

  She turned back in Randall’s direction. “He was cheating on her. From day one.”

  I looked across the courtyard at Randall. I hadn’t pegged him for infidelity when we’d met. I thought there was something off about him, but I didn’t get the sense that he didn’t love Kate.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  Emily turned back to me, the anger changing to sadness, tears in her eyes. “Kate and I were sisters, Noah. We talked. I know, okay?” She brought her hands to her eyes. “I don’t want to talk about this now. I’ll see you later.”

  She walked away quickly and disappeared into the church. Her reaction made me wonder if old Randall had suckered me into thinking he was a good guy when he wasn’t.

  “You think?” Carter asked, his gaze still on Randall.

  “I don’t know.”

  Randall glanced in our direction, raised his eyebrows in recognition, said something to the men he was standing with, and headed our way.

  “But maybe I’ll ask,” I said.

  Carter adjusted his sunglasses. “Oh, goodie.”

  Randall strode toward us, his eyes visibly red. “Noah, hello.”

  We shook hands. “Randall, this is my friend Carter Hamm. He was a friend of Kate’s also.”

  They shook hands.

  “I’m sorry about your wife,” Carter said.

  “Thank you,” Randall said, his voice tight. “Thank you both for coming.”

  Carter and I nodded, that awkward bubble again forming around us. The sun felt hot on my neck, and I was sweating in my suit.

  “Have you learned anything?” Randall asked quietly, his eyes darting from group to group.

  “Not really,” I lied. “This has all happened pretty quickly.”

  Randall nodded and smoothed his tie down his chest. “Sure. Please tell me if I can do anything to help.”

  Carter glanced at me, and I knew he was waiting for me to say something. I was having second thoughts because we were at a memorial service and I didn’t want to take advantage of someone’s vulnerability.

  But Kate was dead and I was frustrated.

  “Actually I do have a couple of questions.”

  He blinked several times, looking almost surprised that I’d taken him up on his offer, then shrugged. “Alright.”

  “The other night you said that Kate didn’t want to be married anymore.”

  He nodded. “That’s what she told me, yes.”

  “Any more thoughts on why she might’ve felt that way?”

  “She didn’t give me anything else,” he said, rubbing his chin. “Never told me what she w
as unhappy about.”

  “Could it have been you?”

  He blinked again and shoved a hand into his pocket. “I don’t know, I guess.”

  I watched him. “Maybe something you’d done?”

  Randall shifted his weight, his impatience starting to show. “Like?”

  “What do you do in your spare time?” I asked.

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Water ski, collect art, knit,” Carter said. “For example.”

  Randall glared at him. “Was I talking to you?”

  “No. That was me talking to you. Pay attention.”

  Randall looked back to me. “Don’t play with me, Noah. Not today. What do you wanna know?”

  He’d raised his voice, and several looks were directed toward us.

  “You and Kate had a good marriage?” I asked.

  His jaw tightened. “I thought so.”

  “How good?”

  The other hand disappeared into the other pocket. “I don’t know how to answer that. I told you things were strained.”

  The sun was high in the sky and aimed directly at us.

  “You cheat on her?” I asked.

  Randall’s cheeks flexed slightly, his jaw set. His eyes narrowed, and the sun wasn’t the only thing that was hot.

  “What the hell is this?” he growled.

  “An investigation into your wife’s death,” I told him. “You asked if you could help.”

  Randall looked at Carter, who had settled into his imposing-but-nonchalant stance. I thought Randall wanted to hit Carter, but the more I thought about it, that didn’t make sense because Randall didn’t seem like a dumb guy.

  Randall looked back at me. “Leave-now.”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” I said.

  His right hand emerged from his pocket, his index finger pointing at me. “This is my wife’s funeral. You wanna fuck around with me? Fine. But not here, not today.”

  “Then when?” I asked.

  He jabbed the finger in my direction. “How about after I rip your fucking head off?” He spun on his heel and walked away from us.

  I looked at Carter.

  He adjusted his glasses. “How will you hear his answer if your head is detached?”

  19

  Carter left the funeral before I did, mumbling something about having to be somewhere. I didn’t ask where.

  I hung around for a while, despite Randall’s threat. I scanned the crowd looking for people who seemed out of place, who maybe didn’t belong at Kate’s funeral, who looked like a walking clue.

  I went zero for three.

  I was heading for my car when I heard someone call my name. I turned around and saw Emily coming toward me.

  “Sorry,” she said, as she reached me. “Didn’t mean to yell.”

  “It’s okay. What’s up?”

  She frowned, looking embarrassed. “I wanted to apologize for earlier.”

  “Earlier?”

  She nodded. “Walking away from you and Carter like that. I just got too upset.”

  I watched the cars trickle out of the lot and down the hill. “I think you’re allowed to be upset, Em.”

  “Well, thanks,” she said, rubbing the back of her neck. “But I don’t need to be rude, too.”

  “You weren’t. It was fine.”

  The corners of her mouth flared into a small smile. “Always the nice guy. Even after living through my family.”

  “Even after.” I paused for a moment. “At some point, I’d like to talk to you, though. About what you told me.”

  She turned and looked back at the church. “The thought of going back in there to help clean up isn’t exactly enticing.” She turned back to me. “How about now?”

  “I didn’t mean we had to do it right away, Emily. It can wait a day or two,” I told her.

  She waved a perfectly manicured hand in the air. “I’m fine. Really. I need to vent anyway. I’ll buy you a drink at George’s. Just let me grab my things.”

  She hurried back to the courtyard and quickly reemerged with a sweater and her purse. She reminded me of a more sophisticated Kate. They were both attractive, but Kate had always been the little sister, looking up to her sister with a sense of admiration and awe. Emily had always been more into the fashion trends and a little more into risk taking, a very cool older sister who didn’t mind letting the little sister into her life.

  I followed her BMW down the back side of Mount Soledad to the jammed up area at Prospect. La Jolla was a tiny strip on a cliff above the water, and traffic was ever present in the area. We parked up on Ivanhoe and walked back to the bluff-top restaurant at the northern edge of the La Jolla downtown district.

  We walked out to the ocean terrace at George’s, a rooftop bistro that drew raves for both its food and coastal scenery, small tables with candles dotting the deck. The restaurant faced north, up along La Jolla Shores all the way to where the cliffs at Torrey Pines jut out into the Pacific at Black’s Beach. The sun looked tired, taking its time getting down in the west as we sat at a table near the railing.

  “Pretty day for an ugly day,” Emily said, sighing.

  “Agreed.”

  The waitress appeared quickly and efficiently. Emily asked for a gin and tonic, and I requested a Jack and Coke. They were on the table in less than two minutes.

  “So,” Emily said, twirling the small straw in her drink. “Pretty weird, huh?”

  I nodded. “Definitely.”

  She tossed the straw on the table, then sipped her drink. “I think I’ve gone through the emotional gamut. Sad, angry, irritated, confused, horrified, miserable. Did I miss anything?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  She shook her head, the sun reflecting off of the small pearls in her ears. “It just doesn’t feel permanent.”

  I hadn’t seen Kate in over ten years, but I felt the same way. “I know.”

  We sat there for a few minutes, nursing our drinks and watching the sun retreat behind the edge of the water. The breeze swept up off the ocean and felt cooler than normal. But maybe it was our mood.

  “You didn’t believe me about Randall, did you?” Emily said quietly, setting her drink on the glass top of the table.

  I shrugged. “Not that I didn’t believe you. I just didn’t get that feeling from him when we met. What you said surprised me.”

  “He fools almost everyone,” she said, the disdain in her voice unmistakable.

  “Even Kate?”

  She laughed softly, sadly. “Especially Kate.” She finished her drink, pointed to it as our waitress walked by, and tried to smile. “The thing is, Kate was always the one you couldn’t get anything past. I’m the ignorant one. But this time, someone fooled her.”

  I had never seen Emily as the ignorant one in the Crier family, but I knew firsthand how her parents could make you feel like something other than what you were.

  “You said before that he was playing around from day one,” I said. “Kate told you that?”

  The waitress set two fresh drinks in front of us and scampered away.

  “About six months in,” Emily said, pulling at the napkin under the drink, “she started getting weird signals.”

  I sipped at the drink, the bourbon snaking a hot path into my stomach. “Like?”

  “Paging him at the hospital and he took longer than usual to return the page,” she said. “Some hang-ups at home when she answered the phone. He lost a shirt she had given him. Just very un-Randall-like things.”

  “What did she do?”

  “Nothing at first,” she said, her thin eyebrows arching slightly over her brown eyes. “She just blew it off as, I don’t know, paranoia. But then she drove his car one Saturday. I don’t remember what for. She found an earring in the passenger seat that wasn’t hers.”

  The stupidity of spouses who cheat never fails to amaze me. You always get caught and it always ends badly. Always.

  “She called me and told me that she’d found it,” Emily said
, still pulling at the napkin on the table. “I said to call him on it. It seemed pretty plain to me. I always liked Randall, but it just didn’t sit right, you know?”

  I nodded and sipped at my drink, the ice dancing off the inside of the glass.

  She shaded her eyes from the bright explosion of the sunset. “So she did. And the asshole admitted it. No protests, no denials, no misdirection.”

  “What did Kate say?”

  “She hardly said anything because he promised her it wouldn’t happen again,” she said, the bitterness spiking in her words. “He swore it was just a one-time thing. And she bought it.”

  The Kate that I had known wasn’t much for second chances with people. You were either honest with her or you weren’t, and you didn’t get a do-over if you weren’t. But Randall had apparently qualified for a do-over.

  “But it happened again,” I said.

  Emily nodded and emptied her drink. “Yep. Different girl, same story. Every time she caught him, he’d admit to it, then promise never again, then screw someone else.”

  “Why’d she stay with him?” I asked. “She knew he was messing around. That doesn’t sound like Kate.”

  “It wasn’t, Noah,” she said, looking at me. “It wasn’t like her at all. But she kept saying she thought this would be the time he’d turn around. She didn’t want to get divorced.”

  “Because she loved him?”

  The waitress slipped another drink in front of Emily, who seamlessly grabbed it and held it to her lips, soft wrinkles forming at the corners of her eyes as she frowned. “That and she didn’t want to disappoint Mom and Dad. She enjoyed being the golden child.”

  The waitress had slid another drink in front of me as well. It was clear from Emily’s tone that she viewed herself as the black sheep of the family. I had never gotten that impression when I’d been around the Criers a decade earlier, but I’d always been on the outside looking in. I wondered if she knew about Kate’s heroin use, but decided against bringing it up at that moment. She’d just buried her sister, and no matter how she viewed her status in the family, shattering Kate’s image might be too much for her to handle right now.

  We watched the sun disappear completely, the ocean going from blue to black. All that was left of our view was the noise of the water kissing the base of the bluffs.