by Julie Vail
“Yeah. Him and . . . others.”
“Uh huh. So, when did this Bennett kid kill himself?”
“May, sometime, I think.”
“Uh huh. So, what did this have to do with David?”
“He thought that the steroid use killed him—that he killed himself during a ‘roid rage or something. So David starts nosing around, asking questions, blaming the use for, you know, Jackson’s death. So, then Rob tells me that he was in Dr. Ondrak’s office one day, and David sees him in there, overhears them talking about getting more supply.”
“David was there because . . .?”
“I guess he had an appointment. He was having some trouble with his arm.”
“Why didn’t you tell us this when we asked you?”
“Because I didn’t kill him.”
“No one said you did, Kevin. Have we once accused you of killing anyone?”
“No.”
“Okay then. So relax, huh? Here, have some water.” I stuck a half-filled cup of lukewarm city water in front of him. “So, David sees Rob talking to Dr. Ondrak, and he overhears . . .”
“Right, so David puts two and two together, he thinks that Rob is involved in selling steroids with Dr. Ondrak, and now he’s got someone to go after for Jackson.”
“Was he? Is Dr. Ondrak involved in this?” I watched him struggle with whether to be more concerned about his business shutting down or looking at 25-to-life for killing one person, possibly more.
“Yes,” he finally said.
“Alright. We’ll get back to him. So, David gets a hair up his ass about steroid use . . . what, he was like the moral compass of Campbell College?”
“Right?” he chuckled. Then he shrugged. “I don’t think it became a big deal until Jackson died. David thought that Rob might have been involved in that. Jackson had a bad reaction to the stuff, and then he started talking to David about it, then he . . . dies, you know? Then I think David threatened to go to the media about all the steroid use.” He chuckled. “Stupid, you know? I mean, the guy just needed to mind his own business. None of this concerned him. He wasn’t using.”
“So who was? Who were you selling to?”
“College and professional athletes. So, you see, David blowing the whistle could kill us.”
“Financially?”
“No death greater.”
“Really?”
Alex saw my face go red, and he stood. He came around and stood next to Kevin Meyers. I sat and allowed my partner to take over before I wrung this asshole’s neck.
“David Crane was found stuffed up under an overpass in Ballona Creek, Kevin. His body had decomposed beyond recognition. You see where we’re heading here? You killed him for money. To say there’s no greater death than financial death . . . well, you see how offensive that is to those of us who see this kind of thing all the time.”
“I . . . I didn’t mean it like that.”
“My partner here, he got a good look at David, you know, when we found him. The critters that hang around down in the creek got to him, Kevin. Kid was a mess. Makes even the tough guys a little green, you see?”
“I . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I need you to know that I did NOT. . . .”
“We’re gonna give you an opportunity to tell us what you didn’t do, but right now we want you to stick to telling us how David got involved in all this. That okay?”
“Yeah.”
It was never a good idea to allow the suspect to deny guilt too frequently. Gives them confidence and weakens our power in the room. Alex sat, I stood, and resumed the interrogation.
“We talked to Matt Chambliss, Jesse Walters and Kim Monroe. They tell us that on the day David went missing, he and Rob got into a fight, and Rob and David left together. Can you tell me about that? I mean, at this point, you’re still at the dock . . . the boathouse . . . because practice is still going on, right?”
Eyes right. Remembering. By asking routine questions unrelated to the case at the onset, we were able to establish a baseline on Meyers. Now I knew when he was trying to recall, and when he was trying to think something up—lie, in other words. “Right. Rob called me at the boathouse at about three and said that he nailed David at the house.”
“Nailed him how?”
“Confronted him.”
“Got it.” Back to the good rapport.
“He said David told him he had evidence now, and that he was going to the police. Rob said he saw David slip a small flash drive . . . you know what that is?”
“Yeah.”
“Rob sees David stick the drive into the pocket of his jacket . . .”
“A red jacket, says Crew on it?”
“Yeah.”
“We found that in the creek, too.”
Meyers sighed. It was dawning on him now that we had all we needed to nail him. Except the facts. That part he did not know. No suspect does. If they simply invoked their right to silence from the get-go, we’d get a quarter of the convictions we get now. The pressing need to confess is sometimes so overwhelming, they can’t stop themselves. Sometimes it’s guilt, sometimes it’s ego. Either way, we get our answers in the end—usually.
“So, Rob tells me he’s taking David to his place to ‘prove’ to him that it’s Dr. Ondrak who’s selling, and who sold all the junk to Jackson Bennett . . .”
“Was it junk?”
“Some of the stuff we sold was shit, yeah. It made a lot of guys sick.”
“Don’t get a lot of repeat customers that way, do you?”
He shrugged. “We just blame the manufacturer and sell them more, or they don’t come back. Either way, it works for us.”
“Go on . . .”
“So, I’m thinking Rob’s gonna take David back to his place, beat the shit out of him and get that flash drive back.”
“What’s on the drive that’s got Rob all squirrely?”
“I think it was all stuff he was planning to go to the media with. That’s what Rob thought.”
“And you, too?”
“Yeah. I guess. I call Rob a little later because we’ve been invited to party with a lot of college football players. Season’s around the corner, so I told Rob to drop David with me, I’d try to talk to him, I’ll get the drive back, and we’ll go off to the party, make a fortune off the football players. Rob suggests we get him isolated, so he tells me to get him into a shell, row down the creek a ways, and he’ll meet us. We’ll talk to David together. I figured we could talk some sense into him, you know? Scare the shit out of him enough to give us the flash drive and drop all this once and for all.”
“And you grabbed a pipe, just in case?”
“I went to my car before David got there to get his laptop. Rob had taken it, thinking he had information on there he could use against us. I wiped the drive clean, and I was going to return it to him.”
“As a goodwill gesture?”
“We just wanted David quiet. We never meant to hurt him.”
“I believe that.” Not. “When did you get the laptop?”
“That morning. Rob snagged it while David was moving in. He knows I’m good with computers, and I had that drive wiped clean in no time.”
“But David had the information on the flash drive.”
“We thought he might, yeah. So, David gets to the boathouse, and I tell him we’re going for a little ride. I like to run the course before a race, and I asked David to come out with me.”
“What did he say?”
“He said no.”
“So, you forced him?”
“I grabbed his arm, and it just . . . snapped. Like a twig. Oh, man, it was disgusting. David was yelling . . . I just shoved him into the boat. We headed down the creek . . .”
“With David screaming? He must have been in pain.”
“He was for a while, but I couldn’t turn back at that point. He calmed down finally. He wasn’t screaming. I asked him if he was okay. He said he was. So, I, you know, asked him for the flash dri
ve he had in his jacket. He said he didn’t have a flash drive in his jacket. I said, ‘Bullshit, Rob saw you.’ By this time, Rob’s above the creek on the street practically, and now he’s yelling to David, ‘I saw the flash drive, you fucker. Just give it to us and forget this whole thing, or you’re gonna get hurt’. So, I grab David and I’m feeling around the jacket, we struggle, he falls into the water. I haul him back into the boat, I get the jacket off, but he swings at me. I . . . I picked up the pipe, and I . . . hit him. I hit him in the head. Oh, shit, I didn’t mean to. It just . . . happened. Thunk! That’s the sound it made. Thunk!”
“Okay.”
“He jumps into the water, his head is bleeding, he’s starting to head downstream . . . he’s disoriented. Rob is up top yelling, ‘Fuck! Get him the fuck back here!’, so I get into the water, grab David, he gets away from me and he starts heading up the embankment toward the bike path. He’s struggling because he’s only got one working wing, you know. But this shit, he’s tough, man. Rob runs down toward David, and all of a sudden I see Rob has a gun. I’m like, ‘Oh, man, this is so out of hand’, and David just . . . stops. He puts his left hand up like, ‘No, don’t’, and Rob just . . . shoots. I’m yelling, ‘What the FUCK! Stop!’ Rob misses the first time, so David runs further up the embankment, and tries to hide under where the bridge meets the embankment, in this tight little area. The embankment is steep and maybe he thinks Rob won’t bother coming down. Rob eases down the embankment, and David is . . . he’s cowering under there like a dog . . .” Meyers put his head in his hands and started to cry. “And Rob just . . . shoots him. Poof. Like that, it sounds. Blood splatters all over the wall behind David. Then . . . then, Rob comes under there, takes David’s jacket off, feels around in the pockets. He looks at me and goes, ‘It ain’t here. The fucking flash drive isn’t here.’ He pulls David’s t-shirt off looking for the thing, feels around the rest of this body. Now Rob’s covered in blood. He’s like, ‘let’s get the fuck outta here’, so he takes off running to his car. David’s body is lying on the embankment, you know, so I pulled him up under so no one sees him for a while, then I haul back to the boathouse . . . what the fuck. I never meant for this to happen. Jesus.”
One of them is feeling around a dead body for a flash drive that may or may not implicate them in the sale of steroids, a Schedule III felony offense, punishable by up to a year in prison and /or a fine. Now Kevin Meyers was looking at 25-to-life, most likely on a murder-two conviction. Had Rob Chambliss still been alive, he’d be looking at murder-one. We hadn’t even touched on the deaths of Rob Chambliss and Jackson Bennett yet.
“I know. I know you didn’t.” I put my hand on his shoulder, and he looked up at me like I was his new best friend. Exactly what I wanted.
“Kevin, I’m gonna call a friend of mine, from the DA’s office. When he gets here I want you to tell him exactly what you told me. Alright?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. Good. Let’s take five minutes to breathe, then I want to talk to you about two other fellas who turned up dead: Rob Chambliss and Jackson Bennett.”
††††
I took five myself, and called Karen.
“Hey,” I said when she answered.
“Nice of you to call.” She sounded annoyed. Didn’t blame her. She’d left several messages. The fact that I was only returning now said a lot. I didn’t know what, yet, exactly. Maybe it would come to me some day.
“Sorry.”
“Yeah . . . listen, John. For some reason this has become too hard, so why don’t we leave it alone.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Yes. For whatever reason you’ve disengaged. You’ve changed your mind.”
“So this is on me now? You said it was over. So, it’s not now?”
“I don’t want it to be this way, John. But I can’t live with you making decisions about our relationship based on some problem that came up.”
“Some problem? This dipstick ran you off the road, you lied to me about it . . .”
“Okay. That one you need to let go . . .”
“. . . then had the nerve to make it up to you by buying you a car . . . !”
“Yes. All of that happened. And your solution was for me to completely uproot my life, right now, and move in with you, not because we discussed this at any length, or because you see a long term thing here, but because you felt some altruistic need to shelter me somehow.” Her voice broke, and she paused. “None of this is about you loving me.”
“What the hell’s it about, then?”
She was quiet for a long time. “You’re confusing obligation with commitment. It’s easy for you to be obligated—you’ve done it all your life. Commitment is something you can’t seem to master.”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“Think about it.” She paused. “You are a wonderful man, but I need to move on.”
I laughed. “You are joking!”
“Have you been listening at all, John?”
“Yeah. What did I miss?”
“Quite a bit, apparently. Goodbye, love. Be well.”
And that was it. I stared at the phone, the dial tone mocking me. Obligation. Commitment.
Weren’t they the fucking same?
I returned to the interrogation room. “Alright,” I said. “Let’s get back to it.”
††††
Two hours later, Kevin Meyers sat across the table from Dan Rios, with Alex and I also in the room. He told the whole story of how David Crane lost his life, and he told it on tape.
He also told us that he did get into a fight with Jackson Bennett, and that he did choke him. But that he was alive when he left him later that night. As Jackson Bennett was taking his last breath, Kevin Meyers was in Ventura, visiting his family.
Dr. Stanley Ondrak was on the boat when Kevin Meyers and Rob Chambliss boarded that day. Ondrak was going to tell Chambliss that he would no longer be providing him or his crew with illegal steroids. The police, he said, were getting too close. Rob lunged at the doctor, and the doctor retaliated with a hard punch to the side of the head, then with another one or two (Meyers couldn’t remember) square to Rob Chambliss’ mouth, loosening teeth. Then the doctor tossed Chambliss overboard, never dreaming that a kid who grew up in California couldn’t swim. Neither the doctor nor Myers could save him. In returning to the boat, the doctor cut himself on a piece of metal—hence, the blood from the unknown donor found in the storage bin at the dock, where Meyers parked his boat.
When we picked Dr. Ondrak up at his home, his knuckles were torn up, and he was nursing a raging infection—typical of a wound caused by bacteria from the human mouth. After talking to us, the doctor accepted an involuntary manslaughter charge. He’ll retire rather than lose his license. It’s a waste no matter how you look at it. And for what?
Eight professional sports figures from Southern California teams were indicted for illegal drug use. All benchwarmers, all now applying for jobs at Kinkos. Three universities were fined and put on athletic probation in an investigation into illegal drug use by players as well as coaches. The investigation continues.
And while college and professional athletes were running to lawyers and testifying before commissions to save their jobs or reduce jail time, another doctor was taking Ondrak’s place, another entrepreneur was going to the parties Chambliss and Meyers couldn’t go to anymore. And the cycle continues. Winning at all costs. This was something I could actually understand.
But I didn’t care about any of that. I didn’t care who shot what into their own bodies, as long as they didn’t take an innocent with them. Finding out who killed David Crane and why was my priority. I didn’t give a shit about anyone, or anything else.
I picked up the phone and dialed Madeline and James Crane.
TWENTY NINE
The man sat in his car, not sure what he was doing here, but knowing he needed to do it. The sins of the father . . . he does not want the legacy
passed down, but it was too late for wishes now.
He got out and crossed the street. He opened a door familiar to him, but not intimately. He was going to change that, he’d decided. He stepped inside and saw the person he came to see. The men shook hands, and then embraced.
It’s good to see you, John.
It’s good to see you, too, Tim. Hair had begun to thin and turn gray on the older man, but he looked good.
We miss you on Thursday’s. Stillwell is taking your spot but he couldn’t hit the side of a barn with that bat of his. We’re waiting to stick him on the DL, permanently, once you come back.
The red haired detective laughed. Yeah, well I told you he wasn’t your best choice, but he’s a nice guy. Charitable. That’s what I told you you needed to be, didn’t I?
Tim laughed. Yeah, you told me. Well, we can talk here if you’d like. The detective shook his head and followed the elder gentleman with the kind eyes. He walked through one door and the man walked through another. They could see each through the wire mesh as the older man put the scarf on and kissed it. Father Tim Searchfield knelt down. So did the detective.
Bless me father, for I have sinned. It’s been . . . a long time since my last confession.
How long, John?
Years, father.
Well, then, he said. We have a lot of catching up to do.
I walked in the door for my seven a.m. shift with Gonzo on my heels. It was going to be a cool day, with a chance of rain. Halloween was three days away. It was far from my favorite holiday. I would go to Alex’s and escort my godson and his brother and sister trick-or-treating. I was looking forward to the moment when I’d bribe them with $5 each to take their bags. Alex laughed and told me it’d take at least a $20.
Gonz and I clocked in, making small talk, and we were five minutes into the minutia of the day when Dale B. walked in.
“We got a report of a home invasion in Venice. Patrol is there. There may still be people in the house. One confirmed dead.”
Alex was deep into something, and he looked annoyed. I studied my partner a moment, then said, “I’ll take Gonz. Come later if you want.” He nodded without looking up.