by David Chill
“Go on.”
“He’s always been the golden child, the one everybody adores. Yes, I was adopted, and I knew it and Cody knew it and my parents knew it. It wasn’t my fault. But I felt like a second-class citizen in my own home.”
“And you figured you’d ruin Cody’s life to improve your own,” I said.
“It wasn’t all my idea. I told Joe, and Joe came up with a plan. Joe always has a plan.”
“Yeah, but you went along with it. You could have shut all this down.”
She shrugged. “You don’t know Joe. And he carries a gun and a badge, so I think you ought to be a little concerned about what he’s going to do to you.”
“Yeah, why don’t you let me be concerned about me,” I said, thinking that the LAPD and Culver PD were probably getting close to snapping handcuffs on Joe Hartwick right about now. “But I guess you’re thinking he might do to me what he did to Ted.”
Kristy gave me a strange look. “Do to Ted?”
I rolled my eyes once more. “Maybe the news doesn’t travel down to San Pedro. Or maybe you haven’t been paying attention. Or maybe you’re lying through your teeth. Joe didn’t bother to tell you he murdered Ted Stoner the other night? In an alley behind a dive bar in Culver City?”
She blinked. “He did what?”
“You heard me. And from the looks of things, with you faking your own death, it’s not a stretch to rope you into this, too. That’s what I meant by conspiracy to commit murder. You’re in some real trouble here.”
She shook her head. “I had nothing to do with that.”
“I guess once you fake your own death, maybe you feel invincible. By the way, the punishment for conspiracy to commit murder can be, let’s see now. I believe it’s life in prison. You aware of that?”
She shook her head again, this time slower. Her breath continued to come in spurts. A few tears began to form in her eyes. “I wasn’t part of this.”
“Why do you think Joe shot Ted Stoner?” I asked, pushing the gun into her ear. “Tell me what you do know.”
She began to shiver. “Look. All Joe said was he was cleaning up loose ends. He said that if Ted was around, he was a risk. I didn’t know he was going to shoot Ted. But I do know people like Stoner aren’t trustworthy.”
I sighed. “Not trustworthy, right. And what about Zander Foley? Turned out he wasn’t stealing scooters or planning to start a competitive company, was he?”
“Firing him was just business. Zander was becoming difficult to work with. He was a know-it-all. We couldn’t keep him around. Yeah, he wasn’t stealing scooters. That was a ruse to get rid of him.”
“You couldn’t have just fired him?”
She shook her head. “We figured with a felony charge hanging over him, Zander would just go away. Wouldn’t demand his stock or any severance. Cost us less in the long run.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, thinking back to Adam Lazar’s comment about money being the root of all evil. It didn’t sound so cliché anymore. “And maybe you can explain why I was brought in on this mess. Why me? Why did you have Ted Stoner loop me in?”
“That was Joe again. Always thinking about an angle. He needed a fall guy,” she said. “Look, Joe had a problem with you. Well, not you exactly. I guess your wife worked for the City Attorney’s office. He worked with her on a case. It didn’t go great, and she blamed him. Got Joe into some trouble with the brass. Said he wanted to get even.”
“Get even?” I asked, feeling my temperature start to rise on this already simmering day. I also felt the grip tightening on the gun, and involuntarily pushed it against Kristy’s temple. Kristy swallowed.
“Look, that’s just what Joe told me,” she insisted. “I didn’t come up with this stuff. What do you think I am, some criminal mastermind?”
“You better tell me everything,” I said quietly, my voice deepening as I thought of Gail.
“Hey, look. it was supposed to go down differently. And not so good for you. Joe had it all worked out. He’d be in Playa Vista because he’d say someone called the tip line. Stoner was going to shoot Cody at WAVE, drop the gun, and take off. It would just be me and you standing there, and Joe would come on the scene and arrest you.”
“Arrest me? For what? Murdering Cody?” I said incredulously.
She shrugged. “Joe thought it would jam you up for a long time, and probably ruin any chance your wife might have of seeking public office again. The bad publicity might even get her fired from her new job, too. That’s just what he said. What he told me.”
I stared at her incredulously, trying to comprehend that there are people in the world who actually think these scenarios up and then act on them. I thought again of the danger in which my job was placing Gail and Marcus, and quickly tried to refocus.
“But the real benefit would have been Cody’s dead and you get everything he had,” I said.
“Pretty much.”
“And this would benefit Joe how?” I asked.
She held up her left hand. A large, sparkling diamond was on her left ring finger. “No one knows this yet, Joe wanted it secret. But we were married a few weeks ago. What’s mine is his, and vice versa.”
I stared at her. “That’s why you named Joe as the beneficiary on your life insurance policy at WAVE, right?”
“How’d you know?” she asked incredulously.
“I do my job.”
“Why is it important who my beneficiary is?” she asked.
“Maybe Joe had plans to get rid of you, too,” I mused, looking at her diamond ring.
She shook her head. “Joe wouldn’t do that. We’re in love. He just wanted our marriage kept quiet.”
“Then no one would suspect him when you disappeared.”
She shrugged. I looked up at the ceiling and back down at Kristy, wondering whether I was in an alternate universe where people viewed the world in a sick and twisted way. “So how did this original plan change? Was Stoner demanding more money, and you and Joe wouldn’t pay it?”
“No. After Stoner brought you in, you went and called that Lieutenant, what’s his name, De Santo? We didn’t expect that. We thought five thousand dollars would get you interested. I guess De Santo phoned Joe’s captain. All of a sudden the plan became high-profile. We couldn’t go through with shooting Cody. Our captain got involved. Joe told Stoner to just fire a few warning shots and take off. He’d make sure Stoner got away.”
“And then you hatched a new plan.”
“Joe did.”
“Ah yes. Joe. Always Joe. You just provided the seed money.”
She shrugged and shook her head yes.
“And the new plan would be you and Joe would push your car over the cliff in San Pedro, making it look like you’d been killed. There were enough oddities about that to rule out an accident. And an LAPD detective like Joe would know how to raise red flags, and make everyone suspect it was murder. You’d drop some things of Cody’s nearby on the street, and Cody would get framed. You think no one would figure out Joe lived in San Pedro? Just down the block?”
“Joe technically lives up in Lancaster. This was his parents’ house and his grandparents’ house before that. He inherited it. It’s been pretty much empty for a year. But I mean, so what? Who would ever suspect he’d be involved?”
I shook my head. “I guess those bandages on his hand came from sawing through the wood planks down the street. The ones that were supposed to block cars from going over the cliff.”
Her mouth opened and closed. “You knew that, too?”
“Yup. When I first met Joe, he said that happened when he was doing some carpentry work. Guess he doesn’t lie about everything.”
She shrugged again.
“Tell me something else,” I continued, pushing the barrel of the gun against her cheek so she could feel the cold metal. “How did you think you were going to pull this off? You couldn’t pretend you were dead forever. At some point, you’d have to come out of here,” I pointed out. “Was that after
Joe cashed in your life insurance policy?”
“The plan,” she said, her eyes closed, “was to come out of here in a few months, after the life insurance had been paid off, after Cody had been kicked out of WAVE. I’d tell everyone I had amnesia. That I didn’t remember anything from the last few months, didn’t remember Joe, didn’t remember anything. By then, Joe would be living a long ways from here, maybe New Zealand, maybe South Africa. I’d take whatever I could from WAVE. We would reconnect abroad and start a new life.”
“And you really thought you’d get away with all this?”
“Joe said they’d give me a lie detector test, but results from those are not admissible in a court of law. Everyone would just conclude I got a concussion from when my car went over the cliff. It was at night, there were no witnesses, that beach below the cliff is a secluded area, so there are no cameras. Amnesia. It’s the perfect alibi for someone who disappeared.”
I shook my head again, thinking if I kept shaking it, some of this might make sense. “Let’s go back to something. You said Joe wanted to frame me for murder? Just because of a work issue he had with my wife?”
She shrugged. “He was humiliated. He said it was the best way to get revenge. Plus, we needed to deflect any thought that I could have been involved. So he’d get you arrested and tossed in jail. You’d be the only one standing outside of WAVE when Joe and the LAPD squad cars came by. That was his plan to get even with your wife. Don’t hurt the person. Hurt someone they care about. That just makes it worse for them.”
Not that I needed a reason to lose faith in my fellow humans, but if anything could push me over the edge, this was it. And while I would rather be the one in the crosshairs of an enemy of Gail’s than vice versa, the entire episode left me feeling sick to my stomach.
“And again, and I can’t keep stressing this enough. You went along with all this?”
“It was a better deal than the one I had. And Joe had big plans.”
“Meaning the money.”
“Yeah. I’d been frustrated for a long time, so when I started going out with Joe, and we began to get serious, he went and crafted this plan. He said he wanted us to have a nice life together. Private jets, big mansion, sports cars, the whole bit. He said he was tired of seeing other people get everything handed to them, and us only getting crumbs.”
“And yet here we are,” I said. “I’m holding the gun, and you’re both looking at life in prison. You may wind up without even getting any crumbs.”
She shook her head slowly. “This can’t be how it ends.”
“You went along with this crazy plan that involved fraud at the very least, and murder as well. That’s not nothing. You’re in it up to your eyeballs. Even if you didn’t pull any triggers.”
“There has to be a way out of this,” she insisted, looking disconcerted. “I didn’t do anything. And I think you’re going to have a pretty hard time proving I did.”
I considered this. If Kristy Groh were arrested and charged, it might indeed be challenging to prove even conspiracy, especially given there was no tangible proof she had been an active participant. Conspiracies are notoriously hard to prove in court. Joe Hartwick might try and say she was the mastermind of all this, or that she was an integral part of the whole caper. But that was unlikely, since a wife is not compelled to testify against her husband in court. And if Kristy hadn’t filed a false police report or insurance claim yet, her biggest sin was being stupid and greedy, and having poor taste in men. I vaguely wondered just how strong a role karma would play in administering justice. It doesn’t always happen. But I had something else in mind.
“For you, maybe there is a way out,” I mused. “I think I may know a way you can avoid prison time and walk away from this. But it’ll cost you.”
“How much do you want?” she asked.
“It’s not money for me. You have to walk away from WAVE. Divest yourself of everything. No stock. Nothing. Move to another state. You’ll need to write out a confession. Put down everything, and I mean everything. I’ll hold onto it, to make sure you keep your end of the bargain, but I won’t show it to anyone unless I need to. You’ll probably never have anything to do with Cody again after this is all over. Not that that’s a deal-breaker for you. You were happy enough to plot out his murder, so that shouldn’t be a hardship, never seeing him again.”
“What if I don’t?”
I pressed the gun against her temple. “After what you tried to do to me and my family, I might just shoot you for the hell of it,” I snarled, mostly for effect, although a part of me was angry enough to pull the trigger.
“You’d commit cold-blooded murder?”
“I’d say I captured you, and you tried to escape. Who’d be around to say otherwise?”
Kristy took a long, deep sigh. “I don’t know about this confession.”
“It’s your only option. You don’t sign it, I don’t help you get out of this. And it may get worse for you. I don’t like people messing with my family. In fact, it infuriates me, if you get my drift.”
She swallowed hard and blinked a few times. “Then why are you doing this for me?”
“I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it to make sure Joe Hartwick takes the rap and spends a long time in prison. And I want to make sure you don’t go and change your story later on. Like you said, he’s the one who thought all this up.”
“So, this is about you getting even.”
“It’s about justice,” I said evenly, thinking of Gail. “But you can call it settling a score if you want.”
“I could just walk away?”
“Yes, you could.”
She thought about this for a moment. “It’s not the worst deal. But it means I’d have to trust you.”
“Yeah,” I answered. “There’s that.”
Chapter 11
I told her Kristy to grab some paper and write out a confession, listing everything she had done and everything she knew that Joe Hartwick had done. I took a photo of it, and then took a photo of it with an unsmiling Kristy holding the page near her face. I then directed her to pack her clothes, along with anything else that might show she had intended to be staying in Joe’s house. If the police did sweep the house for her prints, I told her she could just say she wandered in off the street, and agreed that amnesia is a highly flexible excuse.
I called Cody and told him we had closure on what had happened at WAVE and at the shores of San Pedro, and that we needed to get together. He asked when we could meet. I said it would take ten minutes for me to get to his home.
We stopped at Kristy’s apartment in Playa Vista to drop her clothes off, and then we headed down to Cody’s place in Marina del Rey. Cody lived the way you would expect a wealthy NFL football player-turned-startup entrepreneur to live, which is to say exceedingly well. His condo was on the eleventh floor of the Marina City Club, an unmistakable waterfront landmark. These were a distinctive series of six curvilinear towers that hugged the coastline and provided easy access to the Marina for any resident who kept a yacht there, as well as for those who’d like to act as if they did. It was resort living for those who didn’t want the inconvenience of actually living out at a resort.
Cody opened the door, and the look of shock on his face was plainly evident the moment he laid eyes on Kristy. He was momentarily speechless, so I asked if it was all right for us to come in. He nodded wordlessly, his expression still set on stunned as we stepped inside. We walked into a plush living room with a nice view of the Pacific. It was certainly better than the view from Joe Hartwick’s bungalow in San Pedro.
“What is this?” Cody asked, bewildered.
“This is what you asked me to help unravel,” I said, sitting down on a bentwood rocking chair. I moved back and forth. It felt solid. Kristy sat on the couch, knees together, looking down. Cody pulled a footrest over and sat on the edge. He looked at Kristy.
“So, you didn’t get pushed over that cliff in San Pedro,” he said, his eyes locked on
Kristy.
“No,” I answered for her. “And it was all part of a convoluted plot to push you out of WAVE and push her and her boyfriend in. Or I should say husband now.”
“You’re married?” he asked, curiously.
“I am, you little dolt,” she snapped. “Is that so hard for you to imagine?”
“Easy there,” I warned her. “You’re not out of the woods, yet.”
“When will I be?” she asked.
“When I say you are.”
Kristy looked a little perplexed. The shock of seeing her alive seemed to be wearing off of Cody, but his eyes never left her. “What on earth happened here?” Cody asked. “I thought you were dead.”
“That’s what she wanted everyone to think,” I interjected. “Look, you brought your sister into the company to help you. But I guess you didn’t give her a stake in the business, so she decided to create her own. She faked her own death down in San Pedro and left a trail of breadcrumbs that led to you, as she wanted you to be the culprit. With a lot of help from that LAPD detective, Joe Hartwick, also now known as her husband. Their plan was that after you got brought up on murder charges and got removed from WAVE, she would wander back in, explain away her absence due to amnesia, and take over your stake in the company. Might not have been that hard, seeing as those idiot pals of yours are more interested in playing golf than running a company.”
He continued to stare at Kristy, even though I was sure he heard what I was saying. “I’m trying to process all this,” he said. “The first question that comes to mind is why. Why would you do such a thing?”
“You want to take that?” I said to Kristy. “And maybe lose the snarky attitude.”
She returned her gaze downward, rather than look back up at Cody. “Okay, I’m sorry. I’ve always resented you. Everything Mom and Dad did was about you. I get it. I was adopted. You were their blood. It shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. You were always the favorite. I wanted what you had.”
“What did I have that you didn’t?”
She extended her arms as if to reference the money and the lifestyle. “This.”