Striking Back

by Mark Nykanen

  The prospect of meeting with the detectives at the site of the snake attack made her anxious, but she agreed, insisting that they tell her all they could about Jamison.

  “That’s got to be off-the-record,” Trenton said.

  “Was I the one talking to reporters a few weeks ago?”

  Trenton ignored the jibe. “Three this afternoon work for you?”

  “Okay, I’ll be there. I’ve got a question, though. Did they get rid of the snakes?”

  “All clear.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  She didn’t bother telling Delagopolis about the meeting, knowing he’d say cooperating with the detectives could jeopardize a lawsuit against the city. But Gwyn had already decided not to sue. She didn’t want to drag out the grisly events of the past month for years and years, and she didn’t want blood money. She’d had blood on her hands since the age of sixteen and wanted the taint of death to fade away.

  As she pulled up to the building several hours later, Hark’s words about John Appleton’s past and how it would likely have affected his future came back to her so hard and so fast her stomach jackhammered, and she threw open the door of her CR-V fully expecting to get sick. Three sweaty minutes passed before her system settled. But her mind was still spinning with the understanding that Hark’s words applied not just to Appleton but to herself. She’d slammed the root cellar door and killed her stepfather with snakes, and then she’d done as much to Detective Paul Jamison.

  She patted her face with a tissue and climbed out of the car as Trenton stepped from the entrance to greet her. He told her Warren was upstairs and thanked her for coming, taking a moment to assure her again that all the snakes had been cleared out.

  “How do you know?” she said as they walked into the building. The jungle of old pipes and fittings suddenly appeared like a perfect place for poisonous snakes to lie in wait. “It’s not like we know that there were exactly fourteen of them that had to be found.”

  “Animal Control says it’s all clear.”

  “Oh God.”

  “Look, I personally checked this place and I couldn’t find any.”

  “Right, Bwana. And you’re the great white hunter.”

  “Hey, do I look white to you? ’Cause that’d be a first.”

  Gwyn’s anxiousness wasn’t eased by the shadowy climb to the third floor, even less so by seeing the top half of her studio door: It had been boarded-up where Hark had fallen through the glass, and the bottom was stained with streaks of his blood. Trenton opened it for her, and Warren came forward to clasp her hand in both of his. She wondered if working with Trenton had leeched some of the starch from him.

  Over the next half hour she took them step by literal step through the first phase of the assault, recounting everything from the shout in the hallway to the harrowing trip in the dumbwaiter. Then they walked down to the second floor, and she took them through the last phase, from her arrival in the box with the snakes to her horrified exit from the room.

  Trenton arranged three chairs, but she couldn’t take a seat, not right away. Now that her tense narrative had ended, her eyes were drawn to the posters and photographs, the cars and beaches and women that Jamison had framed behind glass, as if to memorialize all these quintessentially California images. “What’s with all this?” she wondered aloud.

  “We’re working on that,” Trenton said. “We’re not sure, but our guy was doing some serious California dreaming.”

  “He had the car.” She was looking at the poster of a ’65 Chevy Nova. Creamy white like Jamison’s.

  “He had two of them,” Warren said. “That one and a ’64 Mustang that’s an absolute beauty.”

  As she moved along the wall, she asked what kind of guy he’d been before the fire.

  “Great undercover cop,” Trenton said. “He made detective real fast. Fast track all the way. You want to see a picture of him, it’s right over here.”

  He pointed to a poster-size photograph of a shirtless and deeply tanned man leaning against his Nova in a pair of faded jeans that gapped around the lean ridge lines of his hard belly. His blond hair fell away from his handsome, almost pretty face like a stage curtain that can’t open quickly enough, revealing a smile that radiated the raw exuberance that Gwyn had seen on so many young men bursting on to the beach, or climbing into their pride and joy cars to cruise Santa Monica Boulevard. Back then he could have been an actor, she thought. Twenty, maybe twenty-one in the photo.

  “How old was he when he died?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  It hurt to look at Jamison, to sense the loss of so much so fast, and to know that everything that followed was about painful, criminal endings. He’d beamed proudly at the camera. No scars, that’s what she noticed now. Friendly eyes. A California kid for the postcards.

  She had to walk away and didn’t stop till she came to a poster of a stunning, light-haired woman in a Stars and Stripes bikini. She’d seen so many variations of spaghetti-strap patriotism that she would have moved on, but this picture prompted a strangely telling question. “What was his wife like? You said—”

  “You’re looking at her,” Warren said.

  ‘You’re kidding?”

  “No, she’s a major babe,” Trenton said.

  “This looks like a poster.”

  “It is, but this is L.A. You want your wife on a poster, no problem.” Trenton eased his large frame onto a chair.

  “Did she really divorce him, or was that another one of his lies?”

  “No, she really did. Six months after he got out of the hospital,” Warren said and joined his partner on the chairs.

  “Did he beat her?”

  “She says no. We’ve been going over everything,” Trenton scratched his bald head, “trying to make sense of it. You get a detective going off like this, there’s a lot of pressure to find out what the hell happened, so we talked to her.

  “You believe her?”

  “I do,” Warren said. “She was a detective’s wife. She knows the importance of these post-mortems. She had nothing to gain by lying.”

  “There’s always something to be gained by lying,” Gwyn said, “or people wouldn’t do it. A woman, maybe even a detective’s wife, lies about beatings so she doesn’t have to admit that she’s nothing more than a punching bag. So she can pretend her life’s hasn’t turned into a big pile of garbage.”

  “I believe her, too,” Trenton said. “She had plenty of negative stuff to say about him going way back through the marriage. And she seemed pretty honest about herself, admitting stuff you don’t want to admit.”

  Warren had taken a few more notes, but now he paused to tap his pen against the notepad. “Did he say anything to you during the assault that would indicate why he killed those guys or why—”

  “He was trying to kill me? No, I didn’t get the big villain monologue that explains everything. Do they ever really do that?”

  “Sure,” Trenton laughed, “this is L.A. They do it all the time—in movies. And then sometimes we get a guy who’s seen so many of them that he figures he’s supposed to do it in real life. But not much, no.”

  “In the real world, this is what we do,” Warren said. “We try to figure out the whole thing after they’re dead.”

  “So what do you figure?”

  “The fire, that’s what set him off,” Trenton said. “It ended all these dreams he had. What’s L.A. if you’re not dreaming? It’s all about looks, and he was a great-looking guy with a gorgeous wife. And then he was burned up by those bikers like an old newspaper.”

  “It’s also about movies,” Gwyn said. “And he was going to that acting school. I’m assuming that wasn’t part of his undercover training.”

  “Hell no,” Trenton said. “We didn’t know about that till you told us. Turned out he’d been auditioning for parts in horror movies.”

  “Did he get any?”

  “Nah, these Hollywood types, they don’t want any real mon
sters on the set. They want good-looking actors they can turn into monsters.”

  “This whole case is intriguing enough that the department brought in a forensic psychiatrist.” Warren said. “She maintains that every murder represented a very neat juxtaposition of crime and punishment. It’s like he was trying to create a perfectly balanced world with his murders, a perfectly controlled world.”

  “But the murders were way out of proportion to the crimes these guys committed,” Gwyn said.

  Trenton raised his eyebrows. “You really believe that? I mean in your gut?”

  She thought about it, but before she could answer, Trenton went on, “Frank Owens? We’ve listened to that 911 tape, and man, that was a living hell, and I’ve been doing homicide for fourteen years. I’m not saying it was right to murder that son-of-a-bitch, but the psychiatrist thinks there was enough there to make Jamison feel that way.”

  “There’s a little bit of the vigilante in every one of us,” Warren said. “Any officer who’s honest will admit it. So now you’ve got a good-looking cop who’s been burned up and he’s horribly disfigured. He’s out of work, his wife’s walked out on him, and one day he’s watching TV and he sees Alfred Croce blow his wife’s head off. A second later he sees Croce gunned down by the police. He’s thinking, like a lot of other people, ‘Good, kill him.’ But the difference between Jamison and everyone else is he starts thinking it through and sees that he’s got the means to kill more of them. And he’s plenty angry. These abusers have got the whole world compared to him. They’ve got their looks, wives, jobs, and they’re still beating up these women, and here he is with nothing. The officer in him gets real antsy about this, and the vigilante in him thinks he needs to put these guys in hell for good.’”

  “Here’s the icing,” Trenton said. “It’s also a way for him to get back into the game. No more of this disability bullshit. After he killed Santini, he gave the news of the murder just enough time to hit the police grapevine before walking in and saying he’d like to go undercover.”

  “From our perspective,” Warren said, “he looked great. Here was an experienced undercover officer we could put right into the group, and nobody was ever going to suspect he was a cop.”

  “So now Jamison’s dreaming again,” Trenton said, “only this time he’s thinking how he’s going to be a hero when he solves the case.”

  “But he’s the murderer. How’s he going to solve it?”

  “By pinning it on you,” Warren said. “You were a perfect fit. You were a major suspect in what was widely viewed as a retribution-style killing a long time ago, so he knew right from the start that you’d be a major suspect all over again.”

  “But he also had to know that once that happened, the surveillance would begin, and if the killings continued then you guys would know I wasn’t the murderer.”

  “Couple of things,” Trenton said. “We think he was planning on keeping the finger on you for as long as possible. He was having a great time killing these guys. You can see it in the way he did it and in those stupid poems. So as long as you were the big suspect, he didn’t have to worry too much.

  “But we also think he knew that if he murdered someone when you were clearly under the eyes of L.A.P.D., he still had a bunch of men with violent backgrounds who would replace you right away as suspects. Not to mention your mother and her boyfriend. He also had Harken. Once you two started dating, he was a great suspect because of the fuzzy details around his wife’s death.

  “But the big thing here is that he never counted on your driving around L.A. in the middle of the night with a cop on your tail when he murdered Frank Owens. If you’d stayed in your condo, short of us eyeballing you in bed, we would not have been able to rule you out. But at that point, you were off the board as far as we were concerned.”

  “But not the guys in the group, or my mother or Hark.”

  “You got it,” Trenton said.

  “But wait a second, did you really think my mother was killing them?”

  “Her personally?” Warren said. “No, but old Hank the Shank? We definitely thought your mother might have hired him.”

  “But why in God’s name would she have done that?”

  “To protect you. Same way we figure you protected her up in Big Bear.” Trenton threw up his hand like a traffic cop. “We don’t need to get into it, and we know Hastings isn’t pursuing it anymore. All we’re saying is your mother sees Croce kill his wife on TV, and now she’s thinking her daughter’s working with these vicious assholes, and she knows just how vicious they are, so she sets Pants loose on them. Hey, it’s a theory, and when you look at Pants’ background, you got to say it looks pretty good. Okay, so it didn’t pan out, but when you’ve got guys dropping left and right, you try on any pair of pants,” Trenton laughed, “that look like they might fit.”

  “So as you guys see it, Jamison wanted to be a hero, a star, even, in his own way. But it still doesn’t explain why he came after me.”

  “Again, we’re looking at a few things.” Warren crossed his ankle over his knee. “As he sees it, you’re making it possible for these guys to get off easy. They come to a group, fill out their logs, talk about their feelings. That’s it. The vigilante side of him doesn’t like that at all.

  “The other key factor,” Warren added, “and we think this one gets bigger as the case moves along, is what we were talking about a few minutes ago. It’s about control. He had everything under control even after you were eliminated as a suspect. There were still the guys, Doctor Harken, your mother and Pants, and then you took his identity apart piece by piece. From then on, everything he’d tried to become, a great undercover cop and hero, all of that depended on you keeping quiet forever. You unmasked him, and he didn’t have another one to put on. At that point, he hated you.”

  “But I did keep quiet.”

  “But no cop’s ever going to believe that you’re going to stay quiet forever,” Warren said. “Sorry, we know better than anyone that people talk. They’re always telling secrets. That’s how we solve crimes. So as he saw it, he was living on borrowed time, and you were the bank.”

  “So why did he scratch that poem into my painting, and then come by the studio?”

  “He wanted you scared,” Trenton said. “Scared for your life, and he was enough of a cop to know that when people are scared, most of them don’t think straight.”

  “But I was the big suspect then.”

  “But he knew you weren’t the killer,” Warren said. “And he also knew it’s human nature when you’re falsely accused to start wondering who’s really committing the crimes, so he wanted you scared.”

  “But by coming around, he was pointing the finger at himself. He was acting really weird.”

  “Acting is the key word,” Warren said. “Our guy Jamison was very smart. He knew he could let you point the finger at him all you wanted, because in the long run that was only going to undermine your credibility. He’s a cop, right? So other cops weren’t going to buy he’s the killer.

  “It’s when you took away his control by exposing him as a cop that he took the framing to a new level, which meant pinning it on someone else and killing you at the same time. Doctor Harken was perfect. We didn’t have him under surveillance because he wasn’t high on our list, so even in death he wouldn’t have had any cop alibis, like you. But the moment Jamison killed him and we found him near your body, everyone, including us, would have seen Doctor Harken as a plausible killer. All the background on his wife’s death would have come up again, and he would have looked perfect as the men’s group murderer, especially with you lying there dead with a bunch of snakebites all over your body.”

  “We think he’d been waiting for days for Harken to come by your studio,” Trenton said. “And even if he didn’t come by, eventually Jamison would have found a way to kill the two of you somewhere, probably in your condo.”

  “But something doesn’t add up,” Gwyn said. “After he shot Hark, he knew he wasn’t de
ad, so he had to know his plans weren’t working out.”

  “You’re right, but what could he do with you standing right there?” Trenton said. “He couldn’t put a bullet in his head, or you would have known for certain that he was a killer, and then you would’ve taken off like you did once you figured it out. It’s a lot harder to kill someone who’s running away, which he found out. Especially when he can’t just shoot you, right? You’ve got to die from snakebites so it looks like Doctor Harken committed another retribution-style murder just before our hero cop came on the scene and gunned him down. But believe me, if he’d have killed you, Doctor Harken would be dead right now. There’s no way he could have let him live.”

  “In the end, he was trying to control too much,” Warren said. “It’s the nature of police work to attract people who want to control others. It’s just that it got out of control with him.”

  “Batterers are the same way, except with women. And the same thing happens to them,” Gwyn said.

  “We have our share of wife beaters,” Trenton said.

  “More than your share.”

  “We know that, Gwyn.”

  She stood. “I’m not suing you, in case you’re wondering.”

  “That’s what we figured,” Trenton said.

  “Because I showed up?”

  “Right. We figured the Greek would never let you come if you were planning on suing. So how come you’re being so nice?”

  “That’s my line.”

  Trenton smiled. “Yeah, well we like you, too. So how come?”

  “The city’s got enough problems, and you guys are okay.” She shook their hands and took one last look at the posters and photos in Jamison’s hideaway. California dreaming for sure. A pretty state with pretty people, but it had never looked this good and never would. A camera lens sees too much and too little.

  It’s a lot like love, she thought as she pulled away from the old brewery. You take every imaginable measure of your lover. You notice his eyes noticing you, and the smell of his moist fingertips after you kiss them. You look at him so closely you think you can see past all seven layers of his skin to the world of pulse and longing, and you can read it too. But of course you can’t. You can only make tender approaches, dance with the tendrils of affection, and trust that you’ve found someone who knows the sun as well as he knows his own shadow heart.