Hot Start

by David Freed

  “Too bad about what happened with Hollister,” I said.

  McManus nodded. “Roy was one of a kind. His wife was about the sweetest lady I ever met.”

  “That’s what everybody says.”

  We moved up in line.

  “I heard a pretty amazing story about Roy,” I said. “You’d probably know better than most whether it’s true.”

  “It probably is,” McManus said. “Nothing about that guy ever surprised me.”

  I smiled.

  “So what’s the story?”

  “The story,” I said, “was that Roy was pulling down big money flying hookers around the world. European call girls.”

  McManus narrowed his eyes. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “Yeah, well, wherever you heard it, the story’s bull.” The look on his face was one of incredulity. “Roy might’ve been many things, but he never would’ve gotten mixed up in something like that, not for a second.”

  “You just told me nothing about him would surprise you,” I said. “Roy was a pretty good stick from everything I heard. He owned a jet that was single-pilot rated. He didn’t need a copilot. Who’s to say he didn’t ferry those hookers around himself.”

  “Yeah, but . . .” McManus shook his head. “Look, if Roy was doing something like that, I would’ve known about it, believe me. Gantz would’ve, too, and he never said word one to me about anything like that.”

  Gantz was Evan Gantz, Hollister’s other on-call pilot, a laid-back former Navy C-130 aviator who, according to McManus, had left California a few weeks before the murders to take a position flying Airbus 330s for Emirates Airlines out of Dubai.

  I asked McManus if he had a telephone number or any other contact information on Gantz. He shook his head.

  “Haven’t talked to Evan since he took off. No family, no mortgage. Just pack your flight bag and go wherever you find work. Must be nice, you know?”

  “Tell me about it,” I said. “Some of us have a cat to support.”

  “You might want to talk to Skip.”

  “Who’s Skip?”

  “Roy’s brother,” McManus said. “Last I heard, he’s handling the estate. Cut me my last check. He’d probably know where to find Gantz.”

  “Where do I find Skip?”

  “He moved into Roy’s mansion. He’s still there, as far as I know.”

  “I’ll check it out. Thanks.”

  “Yeah, no problem.”

  I asked him how his family was doing because, common perceptions to the contrary, I’m not without social graces. McManus said his pregnant wife had recently been laid off from her job at an art supply store downtown. They were behind on their bills and dreading the possibility of having to move in with her parents up in San Luis Obispo. He gave me his card and asked me to let him know if I heard of any flying jobs. I promised I would and offered to pay for his lunch.

  “That’s OK,” McManus said, “I just realized I’m not that hungry.”

  “The heat,” I said.

  “No, man, that stuff you told me about Roy. That’s messed up.”

  We shook hands. I watched him walk out and get into a gleaming, 400-series BMW convertible, metallic silver. Money’s tight, the wife’s been laid off, and he’s rocking a $50,000 German sports car. “What’s wrong with this picture,” I said to myself.

  I didn’t dwell too long on the inconsistencies. The burrito I’d ordered had arrived. Chili verde, smothered, with just the right amount of cilantro and caliente. It was muy delicioso.

  EIGHT

  The Hollisters had lived in The Knolls, Rancho Bonita’s most exclusive zip code, where the rich and famous frolicked on lush estates shielded from public view by tall, Normandy-like hedgerows and security gates that rivaled any found in medieval Europe. Those who lived there didn’t consider themselves citizens of Rancho Bonita. They were “residents of The Knolls.” They had their own exclusive little shopping districts known as the “Upper Square” and the “Lower Square.” Their streets weren’t streets. They were lanes quaintly named after trees—Walnut and Elm and Jacaranda—where residents walked champion show dogs and rode thoroughbred horses on English saddles, when they weren’t tooling around in their Bentleys. Even the afternoon light felt different in The Knolls. Softer, somehow. Classier.

  Skip Hollister definitely didn’t fit in.

  He was pulling envelopes from a mailbox shaped like a hippo outside the gates of his late brother’s mansion as I drove up and parked in a cobblestone turnout. Early sixties. Scruffy gray goatee. Bad comb-over. Oversized, outdated aviator-style glasses. A stretched-out Fresno State T-shirt accenting a prodigious gut. Baggy shorts. Toothpick legs. Cheap sandals over black crew socks. He couldn’t have announced any louder he wasn’t from The Knolls had he yelled it.

  “Skip Hollister?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “My name’s Logan. My condolences for your loss. I’m trying to get in touch with one of your brother’s former pilots.”

  “Which one?”

  “Evan Gantz.”

  Hollister closed the mailbox hippo’s mouth. “You a detective?”

  “Why? Do I look like one?”

  “Except for the truck. Detectives don’t drive beat-up Toyota Tacomas that make ’em look like they clean swimming pools for a living.”

  “Some do.”

  He flipped through the mail a little too nonchalantly. “What’s so important, you getting in touch with Gantz?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “Because you think he knows something about what happened to my brother and his wife? Gantz doesn’t know squat. He was out of the country, flying for the hajjis over there in raghead land, when my brother got killed. Dino Birch killed my brother, bottom line, end of story. Christ, I told the other cops this already. I thought the investigation was over.”

  “Too hot to be standing around out here, Skip—if you don’t mind me calling you Skip,” I said. “Why don’t we go inside and talk?”

  He fidgeted self-consciously with the sweaty strands of dyed black hair that he’d methodically coiled over his baldness, then turned, limping, and headed back up the driveway without saying anything. I followed him inside.

  A sweeping staircase led from the foyer with its crystal chandelier to the second floor, where a medieval knight’s suit of armor stood guard at the landing, sword held high. The air was refreshingly cool.

  “What is it you do, Skip?”

  “Talking to gumshoes like you who won’t leave me alone, who keep asking questions I already answered a thousand times.”

  “I meant, what do you do for a living.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “I’m just trying to be friendly. It’s a harmless question.”

  “Well here’s a harmless answer. Go fuck yourself.”

  He dumped the mail unopened on a small mountain of other unopened envelopes heaped atop an antique console table and trudged up the stairs in a way that let me know how much he disliked me being there.

  “Where’re you going, Skip?”

  “To get the file with Gantz’s e-mail. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it. Mind if I look around a little?”

  “What the hell. Everybody else has.”

  The mansion was cavernous and felt even more so with many of its furnishings having been sold off. In the living room, the beige, wall-to-wall carpeting bore the ghostly indentations of missing furniture. Over a moss rock fireplace, above a mantle carved from an elephant tusk, hung an imposing oil painting of Roy Hollister. A bolt-action rifle was slung over his shoulder and he was grinning, surrounded in his safari garb by a half-dozen, red-robed Masai tribesmen. The Great White Hunter. I shook my head in disgust and moved on.

  A pair of french doors opened to the back of the property. Through panes of leaded glass, I could make out terraced flowerbeds and a three-tiered, terra-cotta fountain. I could also
see the pool, shaped like Hollister’s beloved Africa, in which he and his wife had died.

  I’m not normally given to morbid curiosity. When you’ve seen enough spilled blood and blown-open chest cavities, you don’t intentionally go looking for more. Likewise historic death locales. Do I care where John F. Kennedy or Honest Abe got shot? Only to the extent that all true Americans feel that tug, to stand where the light of greatness was extinguished. There was nothing overtly historic about the Hollisters’ murders, but there was something that compelled me, a deep, visceral feeling I couldn’t quite put my finger on, to go look at the spot from which their souls had departed the planet. I stepped outside and walked to the pool, past a wooden trellis, its overhead latticework thick with the wilting violet blossoms of a trumpet vine.

  The pool water was crystalline blue. Skip had done a nice job keeping it clean. Had I been alone, I might’ve taken a cooling dip. Slowly, I made my way around the edge looking for chipped tiles or cracked plaster, evidence of the gunfire that had been visited upon the Hollisters that night. But I found nothing.

  To the north, against the rising slopes of the 4,000-foot coastal mountains, I picked out more potential sniper hides than I could count among the gullies and dense vegetation, all within a thousand unobstructed meters of where I was standing. The wind was scorching and dry, out of the east, like a blowtorch. I was rubbing the sweat on the back of my neck, when I glanced up: partially obscured by the vine’s wilting flowers, I could see what appeared to be a bullet strike in one of the trellis’s horizontal timbers.

  I dragged a patio chair over, climbed up, and trained the light from my phone at the hole. Buried inside about an inch deep, I could see the dull glint of a copper-jacketed round. I gently ran my fingertip around the edge of the hole. White paint and loose pieces of wood flecked off easily. This told me the bullet strike was relatively new, no more than a few weeks old; weather and the trumpet vine would have eroded anything older.

  “What the hell are you doing up there?” Skip Hollister was looking up at me with his hands on his hips.

  “Think you can go find me a wire coat hanger?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because I’m asking nicely. I can ask another way, if you want.”

  Roy Hollister’s brother shook his head and trudged off.

  “I’ll need a pair of pliers too,” I said.

  He was gone a couple of minutes. I waited in the shade. When he came back, I got back up on the chair and, used the pliers to snip off the stiff bottom of the hanger, making sure it was perfectly straight.

  “You mind telling me what’s going on up there?”

  “It’s called ‘back azimuth detection,’ ” I said. Carefully I reached up and probed the bullet hole with the wire. “You can determine an enemy sniper’s location by inserting a cleaning rod in the hole or, in this case, a clothes hanger, and observing the trajectory from which the bullet was fired. You got a ladder, Skip?”

  “There’s one in the garage.”

  “Think you can get it for me?”

  “Anything else while I’m at it? A chocolate sundae? Tickets to Disneyland? I got things to do today, you know.”

  “We appreciate your help.”

  Skip Hollister rolled his eyes and went to fetch the ladder.

  I walked back through the house, to my truck, and retrieved the small pair of binoculars I kept behind the seat. By the time I returned, Skip was there with a six-foot aluminum folding ladder. I could’ve used a taller one, but six feet would have to do. I spread the ladder’s legs and climbed up.

  The direction in which the wire was pointed told me what the police already knew and what had already been widely reported in the news: that the fatal shoots had been fired from rising, brush-covered terrain to the north. The angle of the wire would, I hoped, reveal more specific information.

  Balancing atop the ladder and sighting down the hanger wire with my field glasses, I quickly spotted what looked like the perfect shooter’s lair: a sandstone outcropping obscured by a dense canopy of scrub oak, some 600 meters distant. The location afforded excellent cover and a clear field of fire. Getting up there would require some hiking. I made a mental note of landmarks flanking the spot—the curve of the two-lane road to the west of the rocks; the faux antebellum McMansion about fifty meters to the east of the copse of trees—and climbed down off the ladder.

  “Find what you’re looking for?”

  “We’ll see.”

  Hollister grunted and handed me a slip of paper. “Here’s Gantz’s e-mail address. It’s all I had. He didn’t leave no telephone number.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “You know, a plainclothes cop usually shows you his shield and ID before he starts harassing you.”

  “Is that what you’d call this, Skip? Harassment?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Your brother and his wife were murdered,” I said. “If I were in your shoes, I’d welcome anybody who was trying to help.”

  “Yeah, well, you ain’t me.”

  Hollister followed me to the front gate. I wondered why police investigators assigned to the case had not found the bullet in the trellis as I had. Then it occurred to me. Weeks had passed since the murders. The vine would’ve been in fuller bloom back then, likely obscuring the hole.

  “Thanks again, Skip.”

  “Whatever.”

  Why had he been so hostile? Was it me? The heat? The irritation of doubtless having spent innumerable hours answering questions from legitimate investigators? Or was he hiding something?

  Outside the gate, a preppie in his late thirties was standing beside my truck with a blue plastic bag in hand, waiting for a white, miniature poodle to finish its business along the roadside. Topsiders. Plaid madras shorts. Lime green polo with the big, obligatory Ralph Lauren logo. Designer glasses. Too much hair product. The dog began barking and snarling at me as I drew closer.

  “Don’t worry,” the preppie said. “She’s harmless.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” I said.

  He shushed the poodle and made some comment about the weather, how he dreaded seeing next month’s air-conditioning bill. I smiled like I could relate, like I even had an air conditioner.

  “You live around here?” he asked in a condescending tone, glancing at my aging truck. It was a question rich people toss out there as a way to tell the rest of us we’re not really welcome on that side of town.

  “I’m collecting for UNICEF,” I said.

  He forced a nervous smile and that’s when I recognized him: Jackson Giamatti, the money manager who’d shared television time with me in reporter Danika Quinn’s news story.

  “Actually,” I said, “I’m looking into the Hollister murders.”

  “Oh, OK.” Giamatti’s Adam’s apple made like a pogo stick. “I thought maybe you were a gardener or something, not a cop.”

  “I get that a lot. You’re Mr. Giamatti, correct?”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “Saw you on the news.”

  He ran a hand anxiously across his mouth. “Look, I really don’t have anything more to add to what I told your colleagues already, and I really don’t want to get involved any more than I already have. So if you’ll excuse me . . .” He picked up after his poodle and hurried on, glancing back at me and yanking on the dog’s leash when it stopped to sniff.

  I’m not saying the guy was guilty of anything, but he sure did seem to behave that way.

  I sat in my truck and sent an e-mail to Hollister’s other former pilot, Evan Gantz, saying I needed to talk to him at his earliest convenience. I didn’t say what it was about.

  A NARROW, meandering game trail led into the hills. The grade was moderately steep, the midday temperatures broiling. I wished I’d remembered to carry a bottle of water. Far below me, I could see my truck where I’d parked it alongside the road. Above me, no more than a couple of hundred meters, I could see the stand of oak trees near where I believed the s
niper had done his work, but after about ten minutes of traversing sun-baked, boulder-strewn switchbacks, I was exhausted. Just ahead of me, a lonely creosote bush offered the only shade around. I decided to take ten and was about to park myself when I encountered the snake.

  I heard his rattle before I saw him, that distinctive sound that commands instant attention and revs your heart into overdrive. He was coiled below the bush, his tail upright and vibrating, his brown triangular head raised and aimed my way.

  “A mature Western diamondback,” I remember thinking. “Now that is one fine-looking killer.”

  I’d eaten a few of his relatives during survival training. Drank their blood too. They didn’t taste like chicken, like everyone always says. They tasted like raw, uncooked reptile. Standing there, well within his combat radius, I hoped word hadn’t gotten around. We sized each other up for a second or two before he retreated down the hill, disappearing into the rocks. Perhaps he’d concluded the day was too hot and that I wasn’t worth expending the energy on, or that I was entitled to some professional courtesy. Either way, I felt like I’d won the big spin. Fifteen minutes after resting in the shade that Mr. Snakey had graciously vacated, I was back on my feet and climbing.

  Remote as it was, the hilly location I’d zeroed in on from the flats below was far from undiscovered. Empty beer cans, cigarette butts, gum wrappers, and one used condom were scattered under the scrub oaks in a clearing roughly the size of a 7-Eleven. Gazing out between boulders, some as big as hay bales, I had an unobstructed view of the Hollisters’ pool and beyond it, a vast stretch of the Pacific. I’ve seen my share of well-conceived snipers’ nests. This one was as good as they came: obscured from view; a perch from which to fire down rather than up; a restricted avenue of access; and multiple, easily defended fallback positions.

  If I were trying to kill me from long range, where would I set up and take the shot?

  I studied the dirt and clambered over the rocks, searching for ejected shell casings and makeshift shooting platforms— rock piles or fallen logs over which a shooter in a prone firing position could have leveled the barrel of his rifle. I did find a couple of casings, but they were rusted and .22 caliber— too old and too small to have been involved in the Hollister murders. After hunting nearly half an hour, I found nothing incriminating. The heat was starting to get to me yet again. I needed to sit and cool off. This time, fortunately, I encountered no snakes. Back in the day, I would’ve laughed at how sweltering it was. The heat didn’t bother me back then. Nothing did. Now just about everything seemed to, except flying. Face it, Logan, this getting older thing sucks.