by Dave Daren
The late night wind washed over us as soon as we hit the outside, and the parking lots were deserted. Sedona after midnight is like an Arizona ghost town of olden days. A tumbleweed might drift by, but life is as empty and barren as the open sky.
“Quite a different scene than what we came in to,” I said. I wrapped my arm around Vicki, and AJ and Landon walked beside us through a side lot. We were all somber, and AJ held her shoes in her hand. I spotted my car, one of the only three vehicles in this lot.
“You want us to give you a ride to your car?” Vicki asked, her voice hoarse from contemplative silence. They had had to park two blocks away because of traffic and protestors.
“Nah,” Landon said. “I think we need to clear our heads. The fresh air’s good.”
I nodded in silent agreement. I reached my car and unlocked it with the remote. AJ walked somberly with Landon’s arm around her. Her shoulders looked slumped, and I thought I saw her wipe a tear from her face. We had just seen the end of a man’s life. He was dead. And nothing the police found in the coming weeks would ever change that.
Chapter 4
Monday morning in the office came bright and early. By the time I woke, Vicki was already gone. She had to go in early to meet a client with an immigration case.
I took the morning slow and easy, and I stopped for coffee before making the five minute commute to our office. After living in Los Angeles for the better part of a decade, the lack of commute was one of the things I loved most about our new life here.
Our office is a quaint two room storefront in a revitalized historic district. It was downtown, about a quarter mile from where Vicki and I shared a cottage. When Vicki and I met, we worked in a crisp, modern space with all glass that smelled like business and moved like money. I couldn’t have chosen an office space different from where we came from.
I leased a wooden storefront sandwiched between a record store and a smoothie shop. The first time I saw this space, it reminded me of the time I visited the Abraham Lincoln museum where they have his actual office still preserved. I couldn’t go wrong with Abe Lincoln.
It ended up costing a fortune for its vintage appeal. I figured they wanted to put in a trendy boutique from some hip and indie local artisan that sold beaded necklaces and macramé planters on Etsy. I got it, it would boost the “cool” appeal of the downtown area, and a law office does nothing toward that. But in the end, I outbid them, and now I got the cold shoulder from the bead lady who also works at Jamba Juice.
So we moved in, and our little experiment of a law firm began. The office space itself was an open and free layout, with wood floors, and we repainted the walls a clean white. The front door was glass with green wood trim, and our front walls were large windows with long deep window sills. I used them to throw papers. But Vicki and AJ sometimes lounged on the ledges with coffee and a laptop and enjoyed the natural light while poring over grisly murder photos.
Vicki stayed true to our roots, though, by decorating with trendy contemporary style furniture. I was glad she took that over. I would have just gone to Office Depot’s website and clicked on a bunch of random crap and been done with it.
But she has an eye for design. Everything is minimalist and bright with clean lines. We’ve got three desks in the main room, sleek white tables, and white and chrome task lighting, with swivel chairs in the same pallet. We all use our laptops, so we don’t have cluttered cords, and she’s even thrown fuzzy white rugs around in strategic places. The polished dark wood floors and open light added a cozy contrast.
The other room is the conference room where we’ve got an ordinary second hand dining table and whiteboard. Vicki ran out of steam by the time she got to that room. It holds charm in its own right, though, because we’ve deposed more than one felon in that room. We originally talked about replacing the conference table later, but now I’m kind of attached to it.
When I arrived at the office, Vicki and her client Elena were filling out paperwork. Elena had been a housekeeper for one of our previous clients. When he passed away, I had to liquidate his estate, and it came out somewhere in there that Elena had once fled her native Honduras for safety reasons, but had not been able to wade through the asylum process, and now resided in the country illegally.
Her story touched Vicki’s heart, and she decided to take on the case for her. Pro-bono work was fine, and I’m glad Vicki found something that she was passionate about. But I had to devote my time to keeping the money coming in, so I left Elena to Vicki. AJ was in class all morning, it was pre-finals week at the community college. So it was just Vicki and I at the office.
“So,” Vicki told Elena as I settled in for the day, “I did find that your previous application for asylum that was filed with immigration. Like you said, they rejected it. But that was more than four years ago.”
I powered up my laptop and casually eavesdropped. In a town of ten thousand people, there wasn’t enough work to specialize, so we were learning to be a jack of all trades in our focus. Immigration was another area I knew little, if nothing, about. I was sure I would be called in for consultation at some point.
“They said the application was not filed properly,” Elena’s voice rose with desperation in heavily accented English. “I don’t understand what that meant. I talked to a lawyer before, and he said he could help, but it would cost a lot of money. He said I could pay in a plan, and so I paid, and he was helping, or his secretary was. I only saw him once. Then I got sick and had to pay for the hospital bills and couldn’t pay for the lawyer anymore.”
Vicki nodded. “I understand. The amount of time that has passed is going to create a problem. But I think we can work around it.”
I pulled up my e-mails and caught one from Perry McGrath. The estate I managed had just invested in his kombucha manufacturing company. They were working on a facility update, and he sent me a project proposal with a budget breakdown. I replied that it was probably a decent proposal, but I would look it over with the other trustees and let him know before I cut him a check. Then my phone buzzed, but I didn’t recognize the number.
“Henry Irving,” I answered.
“Hello, Henry?”
My eyes widened at the voice. “Julianna?”
“Yeah,” she laughed weakly. “It’s… been a while, huh?”
“Yeah, it has,” I said. “They’re looking for you, you know.”
“Well, they… found me,” her voice choked a bit, and she sniffled. “I’m in police custody right now. They say I need a lawyer. I heard you’re some high-powered big shot now, and I sure could use some help.”
I blinked in shock. “Let me come down there. You’re at the station, you said?”
“Yeah,” she replied.
“I’ll be there in a few,” I said and then ended the call. I turned to Vicki, who had Elena filling out a form on a website, and the office phone on speaker playing hold music.
“Immigration?” I gestured toward the phone.
“Yeah,” she said. “If I can get her assigned to a caseworker, I can expedite the process by working with them directly.”
“They’ve got Julianna down at the station,” I said as I gathered my bag and keys.
She looked surprised. “The dancer? Beowulf?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I knew her in high school, and she needs a lawyer.”
She glanced back and forth furtively, and I could tell she guessed that I had something of a history with Julianna.
“You’re going out there now?” she asked.
I nodded. “Good case. Family money.”
“Uh-huh,” she laughed. “Don’t get any funny ideas, Irving. I know where you sleep.”
I just laughed. That was one thing I really appreciated about her. She was secure enough that she didn’t get in the way of what I was trying to do, or be, with petty jealousy.
The police station in Sedona is a dismal affair, as I suspect is part of the intended punishment. I walked through the doors to dimming fluorescent bu
lbs and an open bullpen of desks that never seemed full. Two cops stood around drinking coffee and talking about college basketball.
“No,” one said. “I’m telling you ASU is going to be big this year.”
“I don’t know,” the other said. “That kid they got on point guard--”
“Hello, Mr. Irving,” a pretty blond receptionist looked up from her cell phone to greet me. “What can we do for you?”
I smirked that she recognized me, although I didn’t recognize her. It was bound to happen at some point.
“Yeah, I’m here to see Julianna Spencer,” I said.
“You want to see them both?” she asked.
“Both?” I responded.
“Juilanna and her boyfriend Gabriel were both arrested with homicide charges,” she said. “You representing them both, or just Julianna?”
“I can talk to them both,” I said.
“It’ll be just a minute,” she said.
She got on the phone while she printed a copy of the police report and handed it to me. I sat down in a row of orange plastic chairs and listened to the two cops drone on about college basketball, a topic I had no interest in, until one of them got a call on his radio and had to leave. The other one noticed me sitting there.
“Irving,” he raised his foam coffee cup to me.
“How’s it going?” I nodded. I couldn’t remember his name, but I recognized him as the officer that had arrested Shawn Drake, a drug dealer we had exposed in an embezzlement scheme.
“Can’t complain,” he said.
“How’s Shawn?” I asked.
He sighed and shook his head. “When that bastard goes to trial, and finally gets transferred anywhere but here, I’m going out for a steak dinner!”
I laughed. “That bad, huh?”
He rolled his eyes, and then the receptionist called out to me. “They’re ready for you, Irving.”
“Thanks,” I said.
I had been here enough times that I knew where the visiting areas were. The visiting room was small and cramped, a tiny room with a two-way mirror on one side. The rest of the room was bare white concrete white walls and a chipped table and gray padded chairs.
Julianna and Gabriel sat on one side, and they both looked beaten down. It was the first time I had seen Julianna in ten years, and I remembered her as a vivacious, bubbly redhead that was in every activity Sedona High School had to offer. Now, she sat in a blue jumpsuit, and she looked so small. Her long red hair was pulled back into a utilitarian ponytail, and without any make-up or proper sleep, her face looked full of shadows and pale.
She smiled sadly when I walked in. “Hi, Henry. Thanks for coming.”
“Hi, Julianna,” I sat down at the table. “Good to see you. I’m sorry it’s under these circumstances. And you are Gabriel.”
“I am,” he greeted me tentatively.
Gabriel looked to be of Hispanic descent, about the same age as Julianna and me, and he had a thick head of curly hair and huge dark eyes.
“Hi,” I said and skimmed the police report. I was there when it all went down, so I didn’t expect it to say anything new. “How are you guys doing?”
They both looked at each other and shrugged.
“As well as can be expected,” Julianna said.
I nodded. “Well, Julianna, they are saying that you stabbed Beowulf in the stomach with a dagger, and they believe Gabriel, you were an accomplice driving a getaway vehicle for Julianna to climb out the window.”
“That’s not true,” Gabriel shook his head vehemently. “None of that is true.”
“It’s not,” Julianna said. “I don’t know what happened. But, I didn’t kill Beowulf. And... what... climb out the window? That’s crazy. They’re just making this up as they go along!”
“Okay,” I nodded. “So what happened that night?”
Gabriel looked at Julianna, who looked down at her hands and then up at me.
“I don’t know where to start,” she shrugged. “I guess I’ll explain about Ghoti first.”
The word ‘fish’ rolled off her tongue with familiarity, even though I had a time reconciling the spelling with the pronunciation.
“I live in Brooklyn now,” she said. “Or did. I moved out there after high school to make it in New York. I did a lot of off-off-Broadway productions for a while. And then I met Beowulf, we call him Beyo. I met him… well, it doesn’t really matter. He asked me out for a drink.”
I raised an eyebrow. She was dating Beyo?
“So,” she continued, “We went out a couple of times, and he was a nice guy. Then, the next night he invited me to his show. I went to his show and saw him dancing with three other girls. Then, afterward he invited me backstage and very long story short, we all went back to this super cool loft where they all lived together, and we all had sex.”
I coughed with shock. “Well, that wasn’t how I expected that story to go.”
She smiled. “It’s weird, I know. Even being from Sedona I was a little shocked myself.”
“Okay,” I said. “So, then what happened?”
“Well,” she continued. “We all started hanging out, and they would do shows around town. Originally I would work crew, and then they invited me to be an understudy. I performed a few times, and then, at some point, one of the girls broke her ankle and quit. So, I became a full-time member, and I moved into the loft.”
I glanced at Gabriel’s reaction to all of this, and he didn’t seem phased by any of it.
“I did that for about five years,” she said. “The thing about something like that, is that being in an odd dance troupe, and living an experimental life like that, is a lot of fun… when you’re in your twenties. Then one day, you turn around and you realize that you’re almost thirty, and you’ve literally got nothing. And as much fun as I was having, it was sobering.”
“So the dance group paid you nothing?” I asked. I opened my padfolio and scribbled notes.
She sighed. “Well, Beyo owned the loft, but other than that, we all pooled whatever money came in from performances and did odd jobs on the side. But, we were a small operation, and we did what we could. So, I had no money, no assets, nothing really, and I’m looking at Facebook, people in my age group, closing on their first houses, getting married, having babies left and right... but my life was so intertwined with Ghoti, I couldn’t see where Ghoti began and I ended.”
She took a sip of the mini water bottle on the table. I stopped taking notes and watched her quiet motions. Everything with her was graceful and poised even in this environment. It always had been. She had grown up in cotillion and took ballet all the way through school. It was no wonder she chose a nontraditional lifestyle.
“Besides that,” her voice started to choke up a bit. “Beyo was a very jealous man. He was very controlling and had a dark side. He had the whole charismatic leader thing. You wanted to buy into it. And when he was good, he was good. When he was bad…”
She shuddered and stared off for a moment. “I started looking for a way out of Ghoti. I didn’t know how, so I started talking to people on Facebook, and through a friend of a friend, I met Gabriel.”
She smiled at the man next to her, who cracked the slightest lip upturn he could given the present circumstances.
“We talked for a few months,” she said. “Eventually Beyo found out, and he lost it. I don’t want to talk about what he did. But, he lost it. That was when I decided I was really going to leave. I talked Beyo into doing a national tour. We had done tours on the east coast, but we hadn’t ventured out much beyond our little corner of the country.
“So we arranged a six-week tour,” she said. “We did dates all through the midwest, and then that was when I worked on my plan. I booked a date back in Sedona, which Marvin Iakova was all over. That was something. Marvin Iakova. Geez. I thought about changing my plan just for that. But, I knew I had to quit.”
“You were going to quit the group that night?” I asked.
“I had it all s
et up.” She nodded. “With Gabriel in Sedona, the plan was to simply disappear. We got a hotel down by the Grand Canyon. We would spend a weekend there and then come home to Sedona forever. It would be morning by the time he realized I was missing. By the time he put all the pieces together, I would be far away enough that there would be nothing he could do.”
“You didn’t think he would send out a missing person’s report or anything?” I asked.
“I planned to send him a text, and then drop my phone into the Grand Canyon,” she said.
“Symbolic and practical,” I said.
“Exactly,” she said. “It would have gone according to plan, if Beyo hadn’t gone for a smoke break before the show. He saw Gabriel and I packing my bags into his car. He confronted us, and he figured it all out. We got into a huge fight, and he tried to grab my bags and lock them into his dressing room. He only got my knapsack, and he thought my wallet and money were all in there, so he thought I would have to go through him to get my stuff. But the only thing I had in there was a change of clothes, and well, one other thing.”
She smiled weakly and sighed. “We stopped at an antique shop on the road, and I had bought this really nice Chinese dagger. I was going to give it to Gabriel, because he’s into stuff like that. When I bought it, it was really a big deal, everyone was talking about it, and handling it. I didn’t explain to them really why I had bought it. But, everyone knew it was mine.”
“The murder weapon,” I said.
“Yeah,” she sighed. “When Beyo took the bag, it was in there, and I knew that if I went back to get the bag, Beyo would find a way to make me stay. He can be very convincing, and if he can’t find a way to persuade someone, he will find another way, like blackmail. He’s just like that.”
“Did he have anything to blackmail you with?” I asked.
“Not that I know of,” she said. “But you never know with him. He finds things, or he can even make them up. So, I decided I would just chalk it up as a loss. I thought maybe, once everyone was gone, there was a chance I could go back to the PAH and see if it was still there. I had no idea it would be used as a murder weapon. We were almost out of Sedona when we were picked up by the police. I swear, I know nothing about the murder. Beyo was a jealous man, and he had his faults, but I never thought he deserved this.”