by David Chill
“Coach, I’m really sorry to hear you’re going through this. I truly am.”
“Listen son, I’ve had a good life. I’m almost eighty. You take what life throws at you and you make the best of it. I’m not complaining, not feeling sorry for myself, and neither should you.”
“Okay.”
“And I follow that old line.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“First thing I do when I wake up is I go outside and get the newspaper. Then I check the obituary page. If I’m not in there, I go and eat breakfast.”
*
The Rams’ practice facility was across the Ventura County line in Thousand Oaks, but fortunately Rhett McCann lived a little closer to me, in Calabasas. This was an upscale bedroom community nestled in a canyon area on the western edge of the San Fernando Valley. He confirmed Xavier had just called him and said I was okay, and he could meet me before practice. He suggested a Jamba Juice outlet in a strip mall. Fortunately, there was a Starbucks a few blocks away, so I arrived with my steaming cup of grande Sumatra.
Rhett McCann was a big man to say the least. Xavier’s estimate of three-hundred and forty pounds might have been on the low side. He was huge in every way, from his big head with curly reddish-brown hair to his massive arms to his enormous waist. His legs stuck out of his shorts like a pair of pink tree trunks. Not surprisingly, he was holding what looked like a forty-ounce clear cup that contained what was probably an orange smoothie. In most people’s hands, the drink would have appeared cartoonish. In Rhett McCann’s oversized paws, it was remarkably proportional.
“Rhett?” I said as I approached and stuck out my hand. “I’m Burnside.”
He stood up ever-so-slightly, and grasped my hand. Shaking hands with Rhett McCann was like shaking hands with a catcher’s mitt.
“Nice to meet you,” he said. “Any friend of the X-man has to be good people.”
“I’ve known Xavier for a few years. He’s a good guy. Heckuva football player.”
“Oh yeah. I played with him for a couple of years when I was with the Bills. Not much to do in Buffalo, we lived in the same condo complex. Played a lot of 2K and Smash with him. X’s place was kind of a man cave.”
“You from that part of the country?” I asked, taking a seat across from him.
“No. I’m a Texas boy. Played at U.T. Hoped to get drafted by the Cowboys, but you go where they want you to go. Buffalo for a while, now the Rams. Next year, who knows.”
“You like it here?”
He reflected on this as he took a long sip of smoothie out of a straw that looked more like a golden tube of pasta. Plastic straws were being phased out in California, and restaurants were scrambling to find replacements.
“The weather’s good and the Rams are doing well,” he finally said. “We have a shot at the Super Bowl. But the people in this town? Look, I’m a down-home guy. Grew up in a small town. Like that kind of life.”
“Understood,” I said. “L.A.’s not for everyone.”
“X told me that you were some kind of detective. Said you thought I could help you with a case.”
“Yeah,” I said and handed him my card. “Private investigator. Doing some background work on a girl you may know. Amanda Zeal.”
Rhett snorted and put his drink down. “Yeah, I know her. Wish I didn’t.”
“What happened?”
“I had met her a few years ago. We came out here to play USC at the Coliseum.”
I smiled. “We won that game.”
“You’re an SC guy?” he asked, eyeballing me carefully.
“Bleed cardinal and gold. Plus, I used to coach there. I think you played SC right after I left.”
“Well, we gave you a beat down the next year in Austin,” he countered. “Anyways, Amanda was working that one, interviewing guys before the game. I struck up a conversation when she was away from the cameras. Hot girl and all. Didn’t think much of it, but when I moved here, X gave me her number. Said she was a lot of fun if you didn’t mind the occasional drama.”
“Okay.”
“I didn’t know anyone here, so I was looking to meet some people. Amanda was a partier, and we hit it off right away. But one thing I didn’t know was that X had gone out with her in the off-season. Not that it mattered really. But I got the feeling he was trying to get away from her.”
“Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know. She’s hot, but also a hot mess. Lots of fun at first. Always knew the right club or where the best party was. She knew her way around this town. We went out for a little while. But honestly, I wondered why she seemed so into me. Girl who looks like that, she could be with anyone. Not hard to tell, but I’m an oversized guy. Girls don’t go out with me for my looks.”
“Some girls like that,” I said, trying to make sense of this. “Big guy like you. Maybe it makes them feel safe.”
Rhett McCann shook his head. “She wasn’t interested in safe. She was interested in money.”
I frowned. I just wasn’t getting why Amanda Zeal would be so interested in money. Wealthy parents, Beverly Hills upbringing, great job as an on-air reporter for Fox. Amanda was only twenty-four, and at that age, money was rarely front and center in importance. Not the way it becomes when a person reaches middle age, and has a family to take care of and a mortgage to pay.
“How much do you know about Amanda’s background?” I asked.
He shrugged. “She went to Stanford, I heard she grew up rich. But that doesn’t mean her parents handed her a trust fund. I got the feeling her parents weren’t helping her at all. Not that they needed to. She was making good money with the network.”
“Sounds a little puzzling,” I said, resisting the impulse to scratch my head. “Tell me more about her.”
“Okay. But what’s your interest here? What did she do?”
I wondered about how best to respond to that without saying too much. “We’re not really sure,” I told him. “I’m honestly not certain where this investigation is going to lead. The more we know, the better. Maybe if you could tell me a little about what you guys did together, where you went with her, if you got introduced to any of her friends, that would help.”
He thought for a minute. “We went to clubs. We talked about music, sports. She was big into football, I guess her dad was a football player in high school. Never played in college, it sounded like he might have regretted not doing so. She and I would talk about the games, I would explain stuff about how we broke down film. She was into it. Kind of cool. Not many girls are that interested.”
“True,” I said, thinking back to when I met Gail. She didn’t know the difference between a quarterback and a first down, and no one in her family was a sports fan. It didn’t matter to me, we found plenty of other things to talk about.
“She asked a lot of questions about teams. It was part of her job to know about football, her being a sideline reporter and all.”
I remembered something Grady Pinn had mentioned. “Did you notice Amanda ever get into it with coaches she interviewed during halftime?”
Rhett laughed. “Did I ever. Man, she had spunk. A girl getting into a head coach’s face and demanding answers about his strategy? But she was, like, fearless.”
“Did that strike you as a little strange?”
He pondered that. “Yeah. It kind of fits with her. She could be a drama queen at times. That became part of the problem I had with her. She was fun and hot and all. But she could be pushy and didn’t like taking no for an answer.”
“That’s sometimes how a person gets ahead,” I pointed out, not entirely sure I liked that, but I recognized it was more true than not.
“I guess. But she didn’t know how to turn that part of her off when she wasn’t in front of the camera.”
“Oh yeah?”
“She was intense. Always after things. Wanted to know about the Rams, our offense, our defense, who’s hurt, who’s having personal issues. After a while, I started thinking it was a li
ttle weird, her doing college football.”
“Maybe she was trying to move up to doing NFL games,” I said.
“Wouldn’t surprise me. She’s competitive. I guess she was a swimmer in high school, she said she almost made the Olympic team, but got an injury during the trials. She’s ambitious. Too ambitious, maybe, you know?”
I thought about ambition and I immediately thought about Gail. When I met with Councilman Arthur Woo last month, he pointed that out about Gail. That she was ambitious, too. I didn’t want to hold Gail back. When I wanted to go into coaching, she encouraged me to try something new, if I had that itch. Sometimes you just have to let things play out in life.
“You said something a minute ago. That she was really interested in money. Did she talk about that?” I asked.
“Nothing specific. I didn’t think she had money problems at first. And I have a sixth sense when it comes to people trying to take advantage of me. Maybe it comes with growing up without a lot. Small town Texas and all. What we got, we worked for. And we don’t just hand it to people for no good reason.”
“How did she react to that?”
“Not well.”
“She got mad?”
McCann hesitated and then looked down. “Worse than that. She stole ten thousand dollars from me.”
My jaw dropped. “How did she manage that?”
“Got my password. Looking over my shoulder when I was online with my bank. Went in and transferred the money into her account the next day, some fake company. By the time I noticed it, she had closed down the account and the money was withdrawn. Gone.”
“You’re sure it was her?” I asked.
“It was her,” he said definitively. “The money got transferred to a company called Breast Stroke LLC. Real cute, huh? It was her all right.”
“You file a police report?”
“No.”
I stared at him. ”Why not?”
“Look, man. I’m not just a public figure. I’m a jumbo-size guy. If this got out, which it would if I filed a police report on a girl, I’d be a laughing stock. I’d never hear the end of it. I couldn’t take that humiliation.”
I stared at him some more. “For ten thousand dollars, I’d swallow a little pride and try and get my money back. Or have her put in jail. People aren’t going to look down on you because you got robbed. It happens. It wasn’t your fault. Plus, your background. You just said you don’t like giving up money unless there’s a good reason.”
There was a moment of hesitation. “It wasn’t just stealing,” he finally said.
“Oh?”
“There was … physical abuse. I can’t let that get out.”
Suddenly, things began to make some sense. The NFL no longer tolerated football players assaulting women, and it took pains to make examples of certain guys. Careers have ended over a single incident, and the lost earnings could pile up well into the millions.
“So you hit her,” I said.
“You don’t understand, Mr. Burnside.”
“What’s that?”
“I didn’t hit her,” he said, looking down. “She hit me.”
Chapter 7
Rhett McCann finally said he needed to get to practice, and I recognized I needed to eat lunch. The problem with eating lunch in an area you are only vaguely familiar with is that you default to those few restaurants with which you are vaguely familiar. In Calabasas, like much of the west Valley, the added problem was that the places I once frequented were now shuttered, or at best, in need of shuttering. The Valley was unfamiliar terrain to me, and the desire to try someplace new felt like it was more trouble than it was worth. There are days you just want to be surrounded by the familiar, whether or not it lives up to your hazy recollections.
I found my way to Sagebrush Cantina, known more to me for its countless beers on tap and endless opportunities for Saturday night hookups than for anything related to fine dining. But it did have the additional advantage of being close to the 101 freeway entrance, and that provided it with an extra-special status. I had last experienced Sagebrush Cantina more than a decade ago, the warm summer memories soaked with alcohol and pulsating with loud music. But on a late Thursday morning in January, it only offered a lifeless plate of enchiladas rancheros, forgettable beans and rice, and an incomprehensible lukewarm iced tea. The three occupied tables on the outdoor patio were filled with a group of soccer moms quaffing margaritas, a pair of aging bikers wearing denim vests over black t-shirts, laughing loudly and downing beers, and a suburban couple in their 60s, who were testing the waitress’s patience by asking detailed questions about black beans and frijoles refritos. The place was sad in a way that a lot of vague memories were sad. When you try to relive them, they fail to stand the test of time, and this one failed miserably.
As I picked at my lunch, I tried to put the puzzle pieces in place on Amanda Zeal, but still, nothing quite snapped together. Her grandfather had all the telltale signs of a good cop gone bad. Her father was a successful businessman who was clever in the way deceitful men are clever, seizing an advantage and then getting his comeuppance. The men who had traversed through Amanda’s love life did not have the best things to say about her. Her colleagues did not respect her. She came from wealth, earned a good living, and had a to-die-for job appearing on TV each week, mingling with famous coaches and athletes. Yet she was somehow in need of money, to the extent she might have stolen some. She had been involved in a couple of physical altercations. Her bodyguard and sometimes-boyfriend had been shot dead, and she had improbably disappeared. No one seemed to know where she was. I took a final spoonful of mediocre Spanish rice, threw some money on the table and walked out to my Pathfinder.
The drive back to the Westside was easy. Maybe the wide open freeways caused an innate relaxation, or maybe it was just idle curiosity that led me to call Drew Slick. But either way, the Beverly Hills Police Department seemed a logical next stop. I really had no next step, so this would be as good as it gets. The person answering the phone told me Detective Slick was in the office but not available to take calls. I took that to mean he was most likely eating lunch, and I also took that as an open invitation to swing by. I had nothing else planned for today, and even if the detective was not available, I could at least spend some time admiring what an idyllic City Hall should look like, that is, if a community had near-unlimited resources and a strong desire to impress. The Beverly Hills City Hall was an architectural masterpiece, replete with a soaring tower, a green mosaic-tile dome, and a gilded cupola crowning the top. It was a City Hall unlike any other, but if this type of ostentatious display belonged anywhere, it certainly belonged in Beverly Hills.
Unfortunately for the Beverly Hills PD, they were not housed within the confines of this spectacular City Hall, but rather, in a more pedestrian building on Rexford Drive, a block above little Santa Monica. The entrance doors were framed with a checkerboard design of light and dark blues, a curious pattern which might have been stylish in a different decade. It now came off as rather tired and worn, a curious piece of art which paled badly in comparison to the rest of the civic center. The police department was apparently unconcerned about properly impressing its guests.
Detective Slick had a phone cradled between his neck and shoulder, his feet edged against a maple veneer desk, knees bent. His gun was on vivid display, tucked into a holster under his armpit. I knew enough to stow my weapons in the car before entering the premises. If there was one thing all police departments had in common, it was that they frowned upon an uninvited visitor entering their place of business packing a loaded pistol.
I waved to Detective Slick, and he looked at me for a long moment before turning his head away. I decided that was the closest I would get to a warm reception. I pulled over a metal folding chair and tried to make myself comfortable as I waited patiently for him to finish his call. I took out my phone and read an article about the upcoming Rams game. They were still favored to win.
“Oh, good, the private
sector has arrived,” Slick said, as he tossed his phone absently onto the desk. A half-full bottle of purple Vitamin Water sat nearby. “What do you have for me?”
“Funny, I was going to ask you the same thing,” I said.
Slick sighed. “Here we go. Just when I was hoping you wouldn’t be like all those other P.I.s.”
“Sorry to disappoint. You crack the case yet?”
“Getting there,” he responded with a wink.
“Oh… ?” I said, leaving the question hanging in the air, thus begging an answer. With cops there was no earthly guarantee they would ever bite, but Slick seemed to be in a good mood.
“Yeah,” he started. “We’re looking hard at the boyfriend, that Wyatt Angstrom. No alibi, no one can corroborate where he was after you left him. Said he was working in his office with the door closed, but that sounded fishy. He came off as nervous and so did that pea-brain assistant of his. Nothing Angstrom said adds up.”
I nodded. “You search his home?”
“Sure. We kicked the door down and tossed the place. C’mon, Burnside. We’re not going rogue here. But I have a funny feeling someone may be swearing out a search warrant any moment now. We take a dim view of homicide in Beverly Hills. This isn’t the LAPD.”
I thought about this and decided to keep the conversation professional. “He own a gun?”
“He does, but hey, so does half of California. Means nothing. We’re still waiting on the autopsy results for Machado. Once we get a read on what kind of gun was used, that’ll help. A little. But it’s not evidence.”
“You think the motive was jealousy?”
“You got something else?” he countered.
“Not really. But I still can’t get that white van out of my head. The one from Star Rentals.”
“Oh yeah, about that. We talked to their corporate office, they gave us a list of vehicles rented in the area in the past week. Ran the plates against our reader, we learned the van that entered city limits. Rented to some kid in Compton. My guys went out there last night and talked to him. Seemed nervous but we’re good at making people nervous.”