Blind Vigil

by Matt Coyle

  “Well, the one in the photo has the exact same colors and pattern as the one LJPD found in the hedge outside Shay’s home this morning.”

  The hedge. Where LJPD’s crime techs set up the screen this morning to keep the press and civilian eyes away from potential evidence. It couldn’t be the same tie. Turk wasn’t capable of murder.

  He couldn’t be.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  ELK FENTON SAT across from me at the picnic table on my deck the next morning. The outline of an outstretched limb connected with Midnight’s head. Fenton had never been to my house before, but Midnight sensed that he wasn’t a threat. To either of us.

  I told Elk about the tie over the phone. However, I didn’t tell him where the information came from. Only that it came from LJPD. He didn’t press me on the source. The source didn’t matter right now. The information did.

  “Did you tell Turk about the tie?” I asked. I considered telling him myself before I called Fenton, but didn’t want to get in the way of the attorney/client relationship.

  “Not yet.” Grim. None of the optimism that bouyed his voice when he talked to Turk yesterday morning. The same way he sounded on the phone after I told him about the tie. “That’s why I came over here. I wanted to confer with you first.”

  I didn’t like the sound of confer. It was something government officials dragged before Congress did with their lawyer while they held their hand over the microphone. Secrets. Strategy. Guilt.

  “I’m not your client. What is there to confer about?”

  “The evidence isn’t lining up in Turk’s favor.” He paused. For effect? If so, it worked. “Shay wasn’t raped, which eliminates sexual predators as possible suspects. Turk was at the crime scene within a couple hours of the victim’s death. Witnesses heard a fight. He admitted to assaulting Shay. He has no alibi. He probably owns the murder weapon. His DNA will be on it and on the victim. And he has the oldest motive in the world. Jealousy. It’s likely that the police will eventually arrest Turk for the murder. Perhaps soon. I just wanted you to be prepared.”

  That had always seemed like a possibility, but hearing it come from the only lawyer I trusted sucked marrow from my bones. My legs felt wobbly. And I was sitting down.

  “How can I help?” My voice, a broken tree limb.

  “You can try to keep Turk’s spirits up.” No easy task with everything that’s happened. “And when we go before the press again, I want you there right by my side as a visible embodiment of a hero’s sacrifice and an unwavering supporter of Turk Muldoon.”

  “Of course.” Elk wanted me as a prop, an icon. The flag behind the president during a campaign speech. Kept in a box until the next time I’m needed to be seen. “But I meant regarding investigating the case. Talking to witnesses. I can start with Turk’s neighbors to find out if any of them saw him arrive home after he left Shay’s. Maybe we can nail down a timeline and a legitimate alibi before Turk’s even arrested.”

  “That will all come if he’s arrested.”

  “We have to get ahead of this.” I stood up. Adrenaline pumping strength back into my legs. “Let’s get started now.”

  “Turk hasn’t even hired me, yet.”

  “I’ll work for free for the time being.” Then it hit me. I didn’t make the cut. “You don’t want me working this case, do you?”

  “Of course I do. I just explained your role.” Cajoling. “It’s an important one. I need you to be the face of Turk’s support. We’re going to be in front of the press as much as possible, countering the prosecution. If it comes to that.”

  “Who’s your investigator?”

  “There hasn’t been an arrest, Rick. I haven’t even been hired, yet. Yesterday was pro bono.”

  “I know you, Elk. You’re always prepared. Who do you have on call right now if this thing drops tomorrow?”

  “If it does, you’ll be a part of the team. An important part. I promise. We’ll find something that fits …” He paused, but not for effect. He was searching for a lifeboat. “Something that fits your unique skills.”

  “Got it. The sympathy blind card. I got that covered.” I really couldn’t blame him. He would probably soon have a man’s life in his hands and he’d made a thoughtful evaluation. He needed an investigator who could see and get out in the field. And he didn’t even know about my epic fail on Prospect Street Wednesday night.

  “I didn’t mean it that way.” Resolute, not defensive. “I already agreed to give Turk a discount if he hires me. I’m only going to be able to have the budget for a single investigator. A year ago, that would have been you. Now, it can’t be. I’m sorry. I wish things were different.”

  So did I.

  “Who’d you put on call?”

  “Dan Coyote.”

  Coyote and I were friends once. Golfing buddies when he was a cop. Things changed when he found out about my past and I stepped on a case he was investigating. They got worse after he retired and picked up a paper badge like me and I tried to reopen one of his old closed cases from LJPD. We became rivals, enemies, vying for Fenton’s business along with a couple other investigators.

  I wished Elk would have picked one of the other two P. I.’s.

  Salt in the wound.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  TURK IGNORED MY phone calls and texts over the next couple days. I stayed cocooned at home throwing the ball with Midnight in the backyard and testing my eyesight. Each day, the outline of objects seemed to tighten by a fraction. I wasn’t ready to go back to my ophthalmologist for tests, yet. I needed to build up a callous on my emotions first in case the tests weren’t as optimistic as I was becoming.

  Kris called me one morning while I sat on my deck conducting one of my own eye tests.

  “Do you know how Turk is doing?” Concern in her voice.

  “I haven’t talked to him in a few days.”

  “I’m worried about him. I haven’t talked to him since … since last Thursday.” The day she and Turk found Shay’s body. “He sent me a text the next day saying he was taking a few days off, but now it’s been almost a week. I know that’s normal for most people after they lose a loved one, but he won’t even return my calls or texts.”

  “I’d give him more time. Some people need to grieve alone.” But the pressure of the police investigating him for Shay’s murder would make it difficult to truly grieve.

  I didn’t really start grieving Colleen until the day of her memorial service two months after her death. The day after the district attorney dropped the murder charges against me and let me out of jail. Even then, it took me almost fifteen years to close the wound of Colleen’s death while I remained a suspect in her murder. Now there’s a scar. Still tender, but the healing process has finally begun.

  “I guess you’re right.” She paused. I sensed it wasn’t a pause for me to jump in, but that she was gathering herself to say something else. “I saw you and Turk on the news last week. I guess Turk thought it was a good idea to hire a lawyer …”

  More a question than a statement.

  “It was only for the day. I talked him into it. We both know Turk’s innocent, but it’s smart to take precautions. Turk handled himself well when the police questioned him.” A white lie. “The lawyer talked to the press to cut off their normal inclination to think the boyfriend did it.”

  “There are TV cameras and reporters outside the restaurant some nights when we open. It’s awful. The reporters shout questions at me when I try to shoo them away. They ask me if Turk’s in the restaurant, and when I tell them no, they ask if I think he killed Shay.”

  This was Kris’ second go-round with the press hounding the restaurant. The first one was because of me. I tried to help someone accused of murder while I still worked there and I became a suspect. Kris was getting her fifteen minutes the hard way.

  “Things will start to die down soon.” More hope than certainty.

  “Do you think …” Her words caught in her throat. “Do you think there’s any
way he could have done it?”

  “No.” Another doubter? The power of the press.

  The media had resorted to calling Turk a person of interest in Shay’s murder any time they did a story on her. At least they did the times I forced myself to check in. Even though I couldn’t see them, I was certain the news ran photos of Shay throughout their stories on her. Standard operating procedure. Nothing lifted ratings like the murder of a beautiful young woman. Dateline and 48 Hours had no doubt already sent producers down to San Diego. We were news for all the wrong reasons, but all the right reasons for the press.

  Detective Denton, now the face, or for me, the voice, of the investigation always offered a no comment whenever a reporter asked her if Turk was a suspect. Which meant, not only was he a suspect, he was the only suspect.

  “Good … I don’t think he could either. Ah, I …” The pause again.

  “What’s bothering you, Kris?”

  “I remembered something today that I saw about a month ago.” Still needing a prod.

  “What did you see?”

  “I was having dinner with my boyfriend, Seth, at Nine-Ten and I saw Shay having dinner with a man I didn’t recognize.”

  Nine-Ten is a restaurant just down the street from La Valencia.

  “What did the man look like?”

  “I’d say he was in his early forties. Pretty good looking. Nicely dressed.”

  “Black, white? Tall, short? Thin, fat? What color was his hair?” I didn’t give her Moira’s description of the man in the Italian suit who I believed to be Keenan Powell because I wanted Kris to fill in her own blanks.

  “He was white, but he was sitting down, so it was hard to tell exactly how tall he was. I’d say average height and weight. His hair was brown and short. I think he had some gel in it. I was kind of shocked seeing Shay having dinner with another man.”

  The physical description matched Powell, but it could match two hundred thousand other men in San Diego County, too.

  “You mean another man, another man, or just some other man? There’s a difference.”

  “I know what you mean, but I couldn’t tell and I didn’t want to stare and have Shay see me.” Stressed. Kris was probably beginning to question how well she really knew Shay and the same with Turk. “I had Seth look at them and he didn’t think there was a physical connection between them, whatever that’s worth. Seth thinks he can read people, but I’m not convinced.”

  An idea struck me that I should have thought of earlier.

  “Do me a favor. Look up Clean Slate Capital on your cell-phone and pull up the Our Team page. I’ll wait.”

  “Why?”

  “Look at the photo of Keenan Powell, the COO, and tell me if he looks familiar.”

  “Oh, I get it. Hold on.” She was silent for twenty or thirty seconds. “I can’t say for sure, but that could be the man I saw with Shay. The man at Nine-Ten looked older, but his picture on the website could be a few years old. I think it’s him.”

  Keenan Powell was the man Shay met at La Valencia and Nine-Ten. Now, I was certain of it.

  “How was their demeanor toward each other at the restaurant?”

  “Well … that’s what was kind of strange.” Another pause waiting for a prod.

  “Strange how?”

  “I could only see part of Shay’s profile, kind of a side angle from behind and to the right. I had a better view of the man.”

  “So, what was strange?” Kris didn’t want to get to the point. Hopefully, there was one.

  “Shay seemed fine when I first saw her and the guy.” Voice hesitant. “But I glanced over when we got up to leave, and she looked really angry. Her face was red and she was leaning forward and gesturing with her hands. I’d never seen her like that before.”

  “Could you hear what she was saying?”

  “No. We weren’t close enough and the restaurant was loud.”

  “What was the man doing?” I asked.

  “He just sat there with a calm expression.”

  “I take it you didn’t ask Shay about her dinner with this guy?”

  “Actually, I did.” She let out a breath like there was no turning back now. “I saw her the next day and asked her what she did the night before.”

  “She told me she stayed home, at first. But she must have read something in my face, because then she said, ‘I almost forgot, I had dinner with a friend.’ I told her that I thought I saw her at Nine-Ten and asked who the friend was. She studied me for a second and then said it was a friend of her father’s.”

  Her father? He was supposed to have abandoned Shay and her mother when Shay was three and died three years later. How the hell would she know who her father’s friends were twenty-three years later?

  “Did she ever talk to you about her father?” I asked.

  “Not really. She told me once he abandoned her and her mother when she was a child, but she didn’t really want to talk about it so I didn’t press her.”

  “Did you think it was strange that she’d have dinner with a friend of her father’s, much less even know who the man was?”

  “Yes, I did, but I could tell she didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “Don’t take this wrong, but for Shay’s best friend, you seemed to let a lot of things go. Most women I know keep pressing until they get to the root problem, especially with their friends.” Maybe a stereotyping statement, but also maybe the reason why so many female lawyers work in district attorneys’ offices as prosecutors. They could be relentless and tough.

  “I guess I’m not like most women, then.” Hurt. “Maybe if I’d been a better friend to Shay, she’d still be alive.”

  Shit.

  “That’s not what I meant at all. I’m sorry it sounded that way.” Idiot. I’d offended someone going through the worst time of her life and who was doing all she could to help me. “I know you were a good friend to Shay and you’re a good friend to Turk. He’d be lost without you holding down the restaurant right now. Did you ever tell him about seeing Shay with the man at Nine-Ten?”

  If Turk knew that the man Shay met at Nine-Ten was a friend of her father’s, would he have hired Moira to find out if Shay was cheating on him? Probably not.

  “No. Shay asked me not to.” She let go a long wavering breath, trying to hold it together. “In fact, she asked me not to tell anyone about it. She said she’d explain why later, but she never did. I let it drift into the background and eventually forgot about it until Seth took me to breakfast at Nine-Ten this morning before I came to work.”

  I was about to sign off, now convinced that Keenan Powell was the man Shay met at La Valencia the last night of her life, when something Kris told me last week bubbled up in my memory.

  “When did Shay have that misunderstanding with your customers?” I asked. “The one where the woman claimed Shay called her husband a fucking coward?”

  “About four months ago. Why?”

  “I’m not sure. Thanks.”

  But something in my gut, the organ that I relied heavily upon as a private investigator, told me that Shay Sommers’ two acting-out incidents were connected and that Keenan Powell knew more about her murder than Turk Muldoon did.

  But my gut had been wrong before. With tragic consequences.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  I CALLED TURK after I got off the phone with Kris. She was worried about him and so was I. But I also wanted to talk to him about the tie the police found outside Shay’s apartment and about Shay having dinner with Keenan Powell at Nine-Ten. Respecting his grief and not saying anything negative about Shay was the decent thing to do. But LJPD was possibly only days away from knocking on his door with a warrant. I couldn’t worry about grief and decency. I needed to find the truth. It was the only way to keep Turk out of jail.

  He didn’t answer so I left him a message to call me, then texted him. Silence. I gave him an hour then contacted Uber through the app on my phone. The driver dropped me in front of Turk’s house around 10:45 a.m. T
he sun had been visible, even to my eyes, while I waited to be picked up in front of my house, but was hidden behind the morning haze when I got down to La Jolla. The smell of jasmine reminded me that it flowed down from the pergola above Turk’s front porch.

  I knocked on the front door and felt a slight tremor below my feet, then saw a shadow cross by the window in the door. But no answer. I knocked again. This time on one of the windowpanes in the door. Five or six annoying raps. The shadow reemerged and a creak and the whir of air signaled the door whipping open.

  “I didn’t return your calls or texts for a reason.” Turk’s baritone voice edged with annoyance. “Just like I ignored everyone else’s. I want to be left alone for a while. You of all people should understand that.”

  “I do and I’m sorry to intrude.” I felt as much as saw his hulking presence in front of me blocking entrance to his house. His only remaining sanctuary. His mass was still large and intimidating, but seemed to be less than when I last saw him. Maybe it was just that my improved vision now better defined his outline. Or, maybe he hadn’t eaten since he found Shay’s dead body last week. “But I might not have time to take your feelings into consideration. Let me inside so we can talk.”

  “What do you mean you might not have time?” His bulk still blocked entry.

  “Let me inside and we can talk about it.”

  He moved away and the door squeaked all the way open. I tapped inside with my cane to a dark interior. I didn’t need perfect vision to know that all the curtains were drawn and the lights were off.

  I made it over to the sofa and sat down. The stench of whiskey mixed with sweat I’d smelled last week had distilled down to a desperate stink, hanging in the air like invisible fog. No cooking smells or even rotting food. Just desperation, embedded into every texture in the room.

  Turk, backlit from gray light coming through the window in the front door, three-legged over to me. Even in the dim light, I could differentiate his legs from his cane.

  My vision was getting clearer almost in real time. With the removal of one fuzzy filter after another.