by Julie Vail
“What do we do about that, now,” Alex asked.
“We fall to our knees in gratitude and thanks. It’ll get us in the house.” As the pungent odor of herb, as we usually referred to it, wafted out the door, we waited for the man of the house to appear. He did so, reluctantly—shirtless, built like a brick shit-house, and stoned.
“Hey, man,” he said.
“Hey, yourself,” I said, showing him my shield.
“Shit.”
“I’ll say. Got some ID on you?” I asked.
“Sure.” He reached into his back pocket, extracted a wallet, and handed me his DL. Jesse Walters, 19.
“So, why don’t you let us in, kiddo. We have some questions for you.”
“Uh . . . uh . . .” He was shitting his pants now, and he was also over 18. Unless we saw pounds of the stuff in plain sight, there wasn’t much we could do to him, but if we could get in the door . . .
“Look, Jesse. We’re not here to hassle you. We need to ask you a few questions. Cooperate, huh?”
“Yeah . . . okay. Seriously? Day-um.” He opened the door and let us in. They were all gathered around, singing praises to the bong-God . . . until we walked in. They looked like they didn’t know what to do with themselves, so they did nothing. There were two other guys, in addition to Kim and Jesse.
“Hey, guys,” I said, trying the good-cop angle. A large bag of weed sat on a square coffee table. A glass objet d’art sat in the middle, and cups filled with liquid surrounded it all. The bong was a twisted mess of thick, multi-colored glass. It looked nothing like the ones I used to make out of the empty toilet paper roll. I was staring down a bag in excess of an ounce, and I was certain no one in the house held any kind of prescription. Medicinal hooch didn’t come in baggies. Luck didn’t come wrapped like this very often.
“I’m Detective Testarossa, and this is my partner, Detective Ortiz. We have some questions we’d like to ask, but I need to know who everyone is first. Let’s get out some ID, alright?” Affable. That’s me.
A tall kid stepped forward, and appeared older than the others. “We know our rights,” he informed me. He stood close to six feet, and he was over 200 pounds. It was all muscle. He spent a lot of time in the gym. I was bigger, but I still had no desire to mix it up with him.
“Do ya?” I smiled. “That’s great. Step on over here, Sparky. You’re my first project.”
“Rob . . .” the other kid hissed.
“You,” I said, pointing to him next. “What’s your name? You look intelligent.”
“Matt. Matthew Chambliss.” He handed me his California DL. “Are we in trouble?” He was built like a brick shithouse as well.
“Not yet, buddy. Hang loose while I advise this one.” I turned to ‘Rob’. “You wanna impress me, Sparky, whip out some ID.” He did. “Robert Chambliss,” I read off the CDL. “You brothers?” I asked Matt Chambliss.
“Yes, sir,” he answered.
“Excellent.” Robert Chambliss was twenty-four. Jesse Walters gave me his ID next, then the young lady, Kimberly Monroe offered hers. They all hovered in the nineteen-to-twenty year old range, except for ‘Rob’.
“Good, thank you,” I smiled, handing the lot to Alex so he could go outside and call in for warrants. “Let’s all go in here,” I said, indicating the living room, which we passed as we came inside the door. Everyone settled, and I addressed Rob.
“What do you do? Go to school, work?”
“Between jobs.” He glared at me with a seething anger. I had a sinking feeling this day would not turn out well for Mr. Robert Chambliss. The group felt the tension, and about the time they started to shift around, Alex came back in.
“Nothing of note, except for this one—possession.” He spoke low, away from the group. “Small amount, it was kicked.” He handed me Robert Chambliss’ license. He lived at an address in the Mar Vista section of Los Angeles, not far from here.
“Good to know, for now. He’s becoming one of my favorites.”
Alex shifted his eyes toward Rob. “Uh huh.”
Detective work is a lot of hunch and guesswork, with a little luck thrown in. Evidence fell into a category all it’s own. I was going on 100% gut at this point. Something didn’t feel right, and it wasn’t about a bag of weed. There wasn’t enough of it to get squirrelly about.
I turned to the group. “We’re here about a young man you might know . . . David Crane.” I paused. They all looked at each other, or to the side. Everyone except Jesse Walters. He looked straight at me.
“Yeah, I been looking for him, too,” he said. “He was supposed to move in here, but I haven’t seen him in weeks.” He was pissed, but didn’t have quite the Jones going that Rob did.
“What’s ‘weeks’? Give me a date, approximately, of when you last saw him.”
“I can give you an exact date of when I last saw him. August third. He was here. He started moving a few things in. I came back, and . . . nothing.”
“Came back?”
“I had to go to Seattle. My grandmother died. I left on the fourth. I came back, his shit was gone. No note, no call, not even a ‘fuck you’. Asshole. We were countin’ on the rent, you know?”
Alex stepped forward. “Jesse, why don’t you come in here with me.” He motioned toward the room we just came from.
“Why?”
“Because I said so.” Alex. People often made the mistake of misinterpreting the cherubic features of Detective Ortiz as those belonging to a pussycat. It generally turned out to be a big mistake, as Mr. Walters was learning.
Jesse Walters got up, and as he exited the room with Alex, he turned back, and looked at Matt Chambliss.
Okay.
“So,” the bright one, Rob Chambliss began, “why are you looking for him? What did he do?”
I stared hard at him. He knew David Crane was dead, of this I was certain. I decided we weren’t going to let him know what we knew just yet.
“I’m going to ask the questions today, Sparky. Alright with you?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Good. So, when was the last time you all saw David Crane? Mr. Chambliss the Younger, I’ll start with you.” Even staring at him didn’t give him the clues he needed. And this kid was in college.
“Matt.” Kim Monroe gave him a shove.
“Oh, you mean me. Sorry. Uh, I saw him, uh . . . can’t say, man.”
“Why didn’t he move in as planned? Jesse said the last time he saw David, he was moving his stuff in.” I looked at each of them. “Please, anyone can answer this question.” Rob stared at the floor, Matt stared to the right, and Kim stared at both of them.
I shrugged, then sat casually on the ottoman at the foot of a rust colored club chair.
“You get into a fight with him, you argue about something? Matt? You live here, too, right?”
“Yes . . . yes, sir.”
“Jesus,” his brother murmured.
I ignored that, but this kid’s luck was running out. “Matt? Something happen?”
“He, uh . . .” He looked into the other room, and then gestured to the table, where the weed and the bong sat. “He was . . .”
“A limp-dick pussy,” Rob Chambliss offered.
“He was a good guy,” Matt corrected. “I don’t think he was comfortable living here, you know? I mean, we don’t do this a lot. We can’t, you know? Me and Jesse and David row for the Crew team. David was a coxswain.”
David was a coxswain.
“You look like you had something to say,” I said to Kim Monroe, a country not heard from all day.
“No, I . . . I agree with Matt. I don’t think he was comfortable living here.”
“He have a girlfriend? Maybe he’s with her,” I offered. Rob snorted.
“I don’t think so,” Kim said.
“Was anyone here when he came to get his stuff?” They all shook their heads.
“So, he had a key?”
They all nodded.
“He came . . . sometime between
the fourth and . . . when did Jesse get back?”
“The seventh,” Matt answered. “I think.”
“So, David came to get his stuff sometime between the fourth and the seventh, and no one saw him, no one has heard from him, and no one has any idea where he is?”
They all shrugged.
“Bullshit. I think we’ll all take a ride.” I stood, making a good show of it.
Alex, seated on a chair in the other room, was in my peripheral. He stood, told Jesse Walters to stay put, and he came into the room.
“Ho . . . whoa,” Rob started. He stood and he took a step toward me.
“Sit your ass back down,” Alex shouted. Rob Chambliss looked from Alex to me, and then instead of backing up, he came forward—and shoved me. Not hard, but it was all I needed. I grabbed Rob Chambliss by the front of his t-shirt and shoved him back down on the couch. I still had a hold of his shirt. And that’s when he swung his elbow, and caught me in the chin.
Ten minutes later, Rob Chambliss was seated, cuffed and bleeding in the back of a patrol car. The wound was not bad—split lip, bloody nose. I purposely didn’t knock his teeth out, although I wanted to. My goal was to get him to the station, not to the hospital. While a patrolman was inside gathering the weed, I stood on the sidewalk with Alex.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” I dabbed at a little blood that gathered on my chin. The blow had split the skin.
“You left yourself wide open.”
“Yeah, pretty stupid, huh?”
Alex smiled. “This working in your favor so far, bubba?”
“Yeah. It’s looking good, actually.”
“The Walters kid knows nothing. Says David was here on the third, moved a suitcase or two in, some books, sports equipment, a laptop.”
“So, where’s his stuff now?”
“Kid doesn’t know. These kids are pumped. It ain’t the pot. No shit I ever smoked got me like this.”
“They’re all built like gym rats. Steroids, maybe. Lots of aggression from both Chambliss boys. This moron is off the chain.” I waved my hand in Rob Chambliss’ direction.
“He almost got his ass shot, Johnny. I’m tellin’ you, warn me next time, huh? I had my piece unlatched.” He looked inside the car again. “He’s ‘roided up, big time. I wouldn’t mind looking for that gun right about now.”
“Yeah. I’d like to search the room that David was supposed to stay in, too.”
“We’ll need a warrant.”
“Maybe not.” I walked over to Jesse Walters. “We’d like to look in the bedroom where David was going to stay. That alright with you?”
“Sure. We cleaned it out already, though. We got another guy moving in next week.”
“Huh. What if David comes back, changes his mind?”
“He’d have done it already, don’t you think?” I stared at him and waited for more. There was always more. “You find him, tell him . . .” Jesse Walters raised his hands. “I dunno. Tell him whatever. Asshole.”
“You seem angry.”
“I thought we were friends, you know? No phone call? I mean, come on.”
And I knew, as Jesse started for the house, that he had no idea David Crane was currently lying in a morgue, black and bloated. Or that prior to, he lay under a boulevard overpass, cold and alone. He seemed genuinely hurt, believing that David just . . . changed his mind.
“You renting this place, Jesse?”
“Yes. We planned this last year, and David was into it.”
“You guys were close, huh?”
“I guess not.”
I thought about telling him that David wasn’t moving in because he was dead, but something told me to keep it from the others for the time being, so I needed to keep it from Jesse Walters as well.
The kid was right. Not only had the room been cleaned, the carpet had been shampooed. I wondered if that would be enough to get me a warrant.
Rob Chambliss was taken down to the station and booked for assault on a police officer. While I wanted to test him for anabolic steroid use, we found none on him, so the test would be performed based on our suspicion only. Since the test is very expensive to perform, I decided against pursuing it—for now. It wasn’t going to prove he murdered anyone. Maybe he was just that—‘roided up, and totally in the dark about what happened to David Crane. But somehow I doubted it. Losing Chambliss’ paperwork would hopefully keep him in jail through the weekend, and give us more time.
Hope generally got me nowhere in this job.
TWELVE
The boy sat on the couch eating a Ring-Ding and watching Dragnet. This is the city, Los Angeles, California.
No, jerk-off, this is the city, he said. There was a knock at the door and he ignored it so that his mother had to come from the kitchen and walk past him to answer it. She glared at him as she passed, and as she neared the door, a feeling of foreboding overtook him. He got up slowly and walked behind his mother. She unlocked the door and opened it. The lady stood there with a basketball underneath her dress. His mother moved her eyes slowly up and down the woman’s body.
Please, I need to talk to you, said the lady. He wondered if she was going to tell his mother that she kissed his father in the park. The boy wondered if she brought the basketball for him, then he realized it was not a ball at all. His mother slowly closed the door as the lady knocked and pleaded, please! Please!
It was close to four p.m., and Alex and I stood on Lincoln Blvd, above the underpass where David Crane’s body was found. Traffic was starting to back up, due to rush hour traffic and our presence. Alex and I stood in the approximate spot the shooter would have to shoot David Crane, given the angle the bullet entered, and the position in which the body was found. I had a collection of assorted rocks piled at my feet. They were all approximately the same weight as a .38 caliber gun—less than two pounds.
“Okay, hotshot. Show me what a starting catcher for USC can do.”
Alex smiled.
“Let’s assume our killer stood here . . . fired down into the victim’s head.” I cocked my finger and pointed it downward, where David Crane’s head was hanging when we found him. “Then tossed the gun. If he was a lefty, he’d go that way.” I pointed upstream, to our right. A member of the SID team stood in water up to his hips. He was covered head to toe in a wetsuit. I shouted down for him to watch where the rock landed in the water, so they could set perimeters.
Alex cocked his arm back and threw. The rock landed with a small splash, as the water had receded quite a bit.
“Nice. Out by a mile. Now, if he was a righty, he’d fire this way, then throw the gun to our left.” Alex cocked and threw downstream, so to speak. It occurred to me at that point that if the currents were swift enough, the gun could very well be somewhere in the Pacific by now. Including the area directly below us, the SID folks now had their boundaries.
“So, how did the red jacket, the t-shirt and the shoe end up in the water?” I asked.
“The shoe’s easy, bubba. It gets kicked off in the struggle with whoever, or he could have kicked out at his assailant and it could have come flying off. He could have taken the shoe off and thrown it at his assailant.”
“I buy all that. What about the jacket?”
Alex grabbed me by the shoulders. “You’re Crane and I’m trying to toss you into the creek, or pin you to the ground. You’re fighting me . . .”
I did. I grabbed at his shoulders, and instinctively ducked my head, raised my arms. Alex grabbed the back of my jacket and pulled it right off my back.
“The t-shirt?” I continued after he handed it back to me.
He shrugged. “Could have happened a hundred ways. It wasn’t torn, right? How many guys have you seen yank off their shirt in a fight? Leaves the assailant nothing to grab on to. Crane would definitely know this. He wrestled in high school, remember?”
It was nearing five p.m. by the time Julie Sebastian arrived.
“Thanks for joining us,” I said to her. Alex raised
his hands in a ‘come on’ gesture. I shrugged. I wasn’t here to make friends.
“This isn’t the only case I have going, detective,” she said, not looking at me.
“It is now,” I answered.
She looked up at me, and in that instant I saw how keyed in to the process she was. She was a professional, and I had yet to treat her like one. We really were on the same team.
“I’m sorry, Sebastian. That was a little pushy.”
She smiled. “It’s alright. You’ll make it up to me soon enough.”
It took her some time to get her equipment out and set up. The sun was now over the ocean and starting its descent. She flooded the area with light. She pointed to several spots that looked like . . . nothing, to me. But she saw something, and she took some samples and tested it right there. I turned to Alex.
“This is so fascinating to me. Why didn’t you pursue this? I mean, I’m glad you didn’t, but . . . I mean, look at this.” Like a kid, with all this.
“Believe me, Johnny, it’s not always this exciting. If you think the down time we experience now is enough to want to put a gun to your head, try this for a year.”
“You don’t know the half of it, Alex,” Julie said.
“I’m getting a headache just watching you here, Jules.” Alex was crouched down next to her, and after she swabbed the area, she stuck the Q-tip in a solution and it turned color.
“Well, I’m about to cure that headache right now. We’ve got blood along the back wall here.” She packed the Q-tip away for comparison back at the lab to David Crane’s DNA. But we already knew the answer to that one.
“It’s so hard to see now, in this light. Is there any way we can check for a blood spatter pattern?” I asked her.
“I was just getting to that.” Julie took out a bottle and sprayed the ground and the wall under the overpass with Luminol, a chemical that reacts with blood, if it is present, turning it bright blue. A distinct pattern of blood spatter appeared. It was the pattern produced when someone is shot at close range. I was shocked that blood could still be found, after rain and time had had its way.