by David Chill
“So,” I said. “I heard you’re a USC girl. Went there with Cody.”
“I am, I am,” she repeated, in a way that was more a normal manner of her speech than anything odd. “Fourth generation. I was destined to go there. In fact, I don’t think my family would have allowed me to go anywhere else.”
“Wow. You’re a legacy,” I said. At USC, like a lot of private universities, legacies were often given special dispensation by the admissions department, and normally got accepted, regardless of how good or not-so-good their grades and SAT scores were. Sometimes their parents or grandparents, or someone up the lineage totem pole, had made a few generous donations, and it was a back-door way for their progeny to get in. Oddly, given the recent spate of sketchy admissions practices, this was often perfectly legal, albeit unavailable to most applicants. It did not require much more than a well-placed phone call or two, and it came replete with subtle hints about future donations. Generally speaking, it’s good form for universities to take care of the offspring of alums, especially those living in prime zip codes like those in Laguna Beach. This is how new buildings get built on campus, and it’s also a reason why SC refers to itself as the Trojan Family, not Trojan Nation.
“I’ve been going to SC football games since I was in diapers,” she laughed. “Seriously. My father never missed a home game. For a lot of years, I didn’t either. It was incredible to be able to watch Cody play for SC. I’ll never forget the long run he had in the Rose Bowl against Michigan. I still remember what he called it. It was a jet sweep.”
“That’s right, that’s what it’s called,” I smiled, thinking back on it. A jet sweep is where a wide receiver goes in motion before the play actually starts. He begins to run laterally across the field. The ball has to be snapped at just the right moment when the receiver is approaching the quarterback, who immediately hands him the ball. The receiver is already running, while everyone else is stationary. In this particular play, Cody took the handoff and cut sharply through the heart of the Michigan defense, so quickly that they could not react fast enough. By the time Michigan figured out Cody had the ball, he had sprinted past the secondary, and simply outran everyone on the field for a seventy-five-yard touchdown. It came in a critical moment of the third quarter and deflated Michigan enough that they did not recover. SC ended up winning the Rose Bowl by eighteen points.
“I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but I played for SC once. Many years ago.”
“I do know that,” she smiled back. “Not because I was paying attention way back when. But Cody told me about you.”
“Recently?” I peered at her.
“Yes, I spoke with him yesterday. I guess you coached him freshman year.”
“I did, but I’ve done a career change. I’m no longer a coach, I’m a private investigator.”
She nodded enthusiastically. “I heard. Cody told me that, too. That’s so exciting. You must have lots of stories to tell.”
I smiled. Just a little. “Most I can’t share. But maybe you can tell me a little about you and Cody. Sounds like you’ve known him your whole life.”
“Forever. He’s my great love,” she said. “We’re like soul mates. We met in pre-K. Love at first sight.”
I stopped and wondered if the feeling was mutual with Cody. Stella did not lack enthusiasm; she was perky, smiley, and effervescent. She was the type of girl that wealthy guys married. But I got the feeling that Cody might have moved on from pre-K, and I wasn’t sure if Stella had done the same.
“Are you two are still a thing?” I asked cautiously.
“Oh, it’s been on and off all the time with us. He was my boyfriend in middle school, but then with his parents, and the jet crash, and all that, Cody moved to Irvine to live with his grandparents. There was kind of a hole there. In high school. We texted a lot, but that was it. And I think it was good for him to go out with other girls for a bit. I went out with other guys, but I always knew Cody was the one.”
I noticed she hadn’t exactly answered my question about whether she and Cody were still together, but I decided there was no point in pushing it. Whatever they were, a couple, a former couple, friends with benefits, it didn’t really matter. Unless there was something else going on. There did seem to be something about Stella that struck me as off, that maybe she wasn’t looking at the same reality, or seeing the world through the same lens that Cody was.
“You know, Cody asked me to look into something that happened at WAVE the other night. Do you know about it?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, her face darkening. “That was awful. I figured that was why you wanted to talk to me.”
“Right. So Cody was leaving the building with Kristy. Can you tell me about Cody’s relationship with his sister? Any tension with Kristy?”
She shook her head sadly. “There’s always tension with Kristy. What a drama queen. Honestly, I don’t know how Cody puts up with her. She is intense all the time. Everything is a big deal with her. She never learned how to just chill. I don’t know why he ever brought her in. She’s smart, and she’s helped him out at WAVE. But she isn’t worth all the trouble.”
“Why do you think he brought her in?”
Stella took a sip of Vitamin Water and thought about what to say next. I took another bite of my turkey sub. It wasn’t a bad sub, but it wasn’t very interesting, either. There’s only so much you can do with lettuce, tomato, turkey, and mayo. It would at least get me through the afternoon, and I was getting tired of tacos.
“Partly because no one else would hire her. She’s been through, like, eight jobs in eight years. Companies bring her on because she’s super smart, and then they fire her because she can’t fit in. She’s one of these people who think they have to win every argument, prove that they’re smarter than everyone else. She’s uber-competitive.”
“Just like Cody. Remember, I got to know him at SC. Most guys who can play sports at a high level always want to compete,” I said, and I frowned a little as I thought back to something that happened a couple of years ago. Marcus and I were playing a game of marbles, and Gail gave me a gentle reminder that I needed to let him win these games. I acceded to her suggestion, but as it turned out, Marcus was as competitive as I was. I wondered how we’d fare with one-on-one basketball in ten years.
“Yeah. Oil and water, I guess.”
I looked at her. “You heard about what happened last night? Down in San Pedro?”
Stella shook her head. “No. What?”
“Kristy’s car was found at the bottom of a cliff. Looks like it went off the road with her in it. Body hasn’t been found yet.”
She stared at me and put her hand to her mouth. “Oh, my. That’s … oh no. Now I feel terrible about what I said about her.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “You didn’t know. Anything you can think of that might provide some insight here? Friends, colleagues, boyfriends, anyone?”
She looked down. “I … don’t know. Wait. I did hear something about Kristy seeing someone. And it’s funny, you know. I heard he grew up in San Pedro, too, near the beach. Do you think that might be important?”
Chapter 8
After my lunch with Stella Frey, I trudged back to WAVE and interviewed a few more employees, and came away with mostly nothing. No relevant details were added to the case. No one understood why gunshots might have been fired the other night, nor did they have the foggiest idea why someone would want to shoot Cody or Kristy. I learned that no one especially liked Kristy, but not to the extent where plunging off of a cliff and being swept into the ocean was enthusiastically endorsed. And even if Kristy indeed had a boyfriend, no one knew who that was, and the larger question seemed to be why any guy would ever want to be her boyfriend. I thought about Stella’s more specific comment about Kristy having a boyfriend who grew up in San Pedro, but San Pedro had a male population approaching thirty thousand, so culling that down might take a little while.
I drove back up to my office and scoured social media
to see if Kristy had posted any personal pictures. I checked her background at UCLA and in high school but found nada. Her Facebook profile was just a series of cover photos of herself. I looked up Cody and found much the same. Cody at least had a Twitter feed he used to send out regular tweets about the great things happening at WAVE and about the progress he was making in rehabbing his leg. I checked out his parents’ jet crash, and found only the most basic information, that the plane had experienced engine failure, forcing an emergency landing that ended tragically. I learned that his grandparents had once owned a small chain of hardware stores, that they now lived in Irvine, and were retired. Whatever lives his family had led, they mostly did so under the cover of privacy, which, of course, is a very twentieth-century way to live your life. It certainly did me no good in investigating this case. I pondered what to do next, but was again coming up with nothing. And then my office door opened.
“Wow, this is how the private eyes work,” sniffed Paul Rainey, looking around at my bare walls and minimalist furniture. His partner, Joe Hartwick, followed him in.
“I don’t need to impress clients with palatial surroundings,” I said.
“That’s good, because you’d fail miserably,” he responded and sat down in the chair across from me. Hartwick walked over to a file cabinet and leaned against it.
“I appreciate your dropping by to critique my office decor. As a government employee, I’ll take your business suggestions with all the seriousness they deserve.”
“Wise guy,” he responded. “I do wonder how you get your clients. It’s not through your smooth manners.”
“It’s because I’m such a nice guy,” I said, pasting a phony smile on my face. “I also get the job done for my clients. Usually when the police don’t.”
“Uh-huh. How about when you get in the way of us doing our job? It’s called interfering with a police investigation. It comes with a thousand-dollar fine. And oh yeah, a year in prison.”
I gave him a curious look. There was indeed such a law on the books, but it was normally reserved for physically preventing an officer from entering a residence, refusing to leave the scene of a crime, or in some clear and obvious way obstructing the police. It was rarely enforced for conducting a parallel investigation, and even then, there was a kettle-sized burden of proof required. It’s a charge that would ultimately get dismissed, but would be time-consuming and an annoyance.
“Tell me how I’m interfering with the police,” I said. “And by the police, I suppose that means you.”
“Yeah, that’s us, Slick. You want to know what you did? Maybe by you going and questioning a number of potential suspects, and providing them with information about an ongoing homicide investigation. And interviewing them before they could be talked to by the police. That sound like something you’ve been doing?”
It took a moment but I recognized I would not be arrested for any such crime, at least not today. If that were the plan, I’d already be in handcuffs, and I’d be getting bum-rushed down the elevator. That small bit of assurance allowed me to voice an outsized sense of indignation.
“What I was doing,” I said evenly, “was an investigation I was hired to do. And I didn’t provide anyone with any extra information they couldn’t have already picked up from a news outlet.”
Joe Hartwick stepped forward. “I wonder how a judge will look at that,” he mused. “And I wonder how you’d like to spend your time inside of a courtroom defending yourself. I’d also say you’d be spending a lot of money on legal fees, but we all know you’d be getting free lawyering at home, right?”
I felt my body stiffen. Until recently, most cops were unaware that my wife was in the legal profession. But since Gail’s ill-fated run for the City Attorney’s job earlier this year, we had landed squarely in the public eye, partly by my doing, getting into that scrape outside of Chuck E. Cheese. But I also recalled Gail saying she had worked with these two once, so maybe that’s where Hartwick learned it.
“You know about my wife?” I peered at him.
“Yeah, we know all about Gail Pepper, and that she’s in private practice now. She’s a tough lawyer, but I doubt she’d want to keep fighting your public legal battles, huh?”
“Sounds like a threat,” I said.
“Just a piece of friendly advice,” Rainey said. “But since we’re here, maybe you can tell us a little more about what you’ve learned. We don’t want to have to find out from that goddamned Filipino lieutenant over in West L.A.”
“Especially after I say you called him that goddamned Filipino.”
“At least I got his ethnicity right,” he managed.
“Look, I’m flattered you guys drove all the way here just to solicit my opinion and share your racism. After you provided your, uh, friendly advice. And are now asking me for any info I’ve uncovered on a case you probably can’t solve.”
“We had to drop something off at the West L.A. Division. And I wanted to have a word with that Lieutenant De Santo. But since we were in the neighborhood, why not drop by? Whatever you know, we should know, too, right? Regardless of the method you used to learn it.”
“Right,” I said warily. “But I’m not sure how much new intel I have. WAVE is likely to fail. The business isn’t being run right. They fired an executive named Zander Foley. Accused him of stealing, but none of that made any sense. At least not to him, or to me. And so far as I understand, no charges have been filed against him. You may know something about that.”
Rainey shrugged. “Okay, Slick, you got that last part right. We looked hard at Foley. There were some accusations made, he’s still a person of interest, but we never booked him. Doesn’t mean he left WAVE on good terms. Some bad blood there.”
“You think he was behind all this?” I asked.
“Pushed Kristy over the cliff? Maybe yes, maybe no. But we’re looking into whether he had any connection to that other pal of yours, that guy you called Ted Stoner. Someone had to have put Stoner up to the shooting.”
“Speaking of which,” I said, suddenly thinking of the young man sitting next to Stella at the food court, the one with the yellow t-shirt that promoted a gym called Super-Fit. “How are you coming along in finding Ted Stoner? Or am I going to have to do that, too?”
“He’s in the wind,” Hartwick said with a wave of the hand. “We’ll find him eventually, but he isn’t a priority right now. No one got hurt, just some property damage. We have other leads. But tell me something. What about that cupcake you talked to after Foley?”
“Stella Frey? You been following me?”
Hartwick walked over to my desk and looked at it. He picked up a photo of Gail, glanced at it for a moment and then put it back down. “You think we have time to just follow some PI around? We’ve been chasing the same leads, you just got to her first. Yeah, I mean Stella Frey, the one with the skin-tight leggings. Doesn’t leave a lot to the imagination, know what I mean?”
I tried not to think about what went on in Joe Hartwick’s imagination. “She didn’t think too much of Kristy, but maybe Stella’s a little too attached to Cody. She’s been called the sometime girlfriend.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.
“From what I can gather, she takes the relationship more seriously than Cody. His cofounders at WAVE seem to think Cody likes playing the field.”
“You think she had anything to do with Kristy going over the cliff? Anything that ties her to that?”
I shrugged. “No idea at this point, but my sixth sense says probably not. Even if she were deluding herself into thinking she and Cody were a serious thing, even if she had imagined her and Cody being life-long lovebirds, which I don’t think they were, and even if she were a little soft in the head, which may well be the case, nothing about her indicates she’d stoop to premeditated murder.”
Hartwick reached over and picked up a painted rock that sat on my desk next to a stapler. This was a Father’s Day present Marcus had made for me in preschool, a simple
rock that was small enough to fit snugly in my hand, but heavy enough to serve as a paperweight. It was painted blue and pink, and had gold and silver sparkles lined across the top. It was one of those keepsakes that was worth absolutely nothing to most people, but everything to me. I had to hold back a desire to yank it out of Hartwick’s hands, instead, I just hoped he wouldn’t drop it. I’m sure Dr. Rosenbloom would have been impressed at my restraint.
“Tell me what you think about Cody Groh,” he said, still fingering the rock.
“Same thing I told this guy yesterday,” I said evenly, jerking a finger at Rainey.
“You talked about his history. Tell us about where his head’s at today.”
“If you guys are thinking Cody had something to do with his sister, then I think you’re headed down the wrong path. I haven’t found out anything at all that would tie him to this. Plus, I don’t see a motive.”
“We heard the sister was making trouble at his company,” Rainey said.
“That doesn’t mean Cody killed her.”
“We found something down in San Pedro, down the street from where her car went over the edge. It was a book, something about startup businesses. There was an inscription from Kristy to Cody, something like ‘I think you’ll find this a useful read.’ Something like that. Pretty obvious Cody dropped it.”