by Paul Bishop
We had crested the Sepulveda pass and were dropping down into the San Fernando Valley. Pagan smoothly changed lanes and picked up the 101 Freeway north, which meant we were actually going west across the Valley toward Ventura County. Sometimes in L.A. do you have to go north to go west.
The traffic began to flow and we shortly passed the Topanga Canyon Boulevard off-ramp, which was the exit I used to get to my apartment complex. I still didn’t ask where The Hacienda was, but ten minutes later Pagan took the Kanan Road exit in Agoura Hills – an upscale bedroom community just outside the LA County line.
He turned left from the freeway exit and back over the freeway. He passed Roadside Drive, which ran parallel to the freeway, turning right at the next light – Agoura Road.
A half mile later, he pulled into a clearly upscale collection of shops, restaurants and offices all sharing the same Spanish Mediterranean architecture. There was a large, well-maintained gravel parking lot, which was almost full. People talked, drank coffee or simply sat in unique socializing areas – some connected to the restaurants while others had a park like feel.
“The Hacienda,” Pagan said, parking in a well-marked reserved section at one end. My Honda Accord was parked one spot over. Beyond it there was a red and gold Airstream coach parked along one of the stucco boundary walls.
I craned my neck looking around. The small shopping and restaurant arcade appeared self-contained, as if we had entered a separate country. In the early evening darkness the buildings looked surprisingly pretty. The signage for each of the businesses was muted and consistent. The beige stucco walls were covered in vines, fragrant blooming honeysuckle, and twinkling lights leading up to the windows of the second story and the red tiled multi-level roof above. Numerous trees, bushes, and several fountains gave the whole collection the feel of a palazzo. I was surprised nobody asked me for my passport.
The mix of shops, offices, and restaurants had an interesting natural flow. The island style of the Tiki Joe’s coffee bar at the far end somehow blended into Sophia’s Italian Trattoria next door, which itself blended into the next retail establishment, a row of non-descript offices, what appeared to be a British pub called The Raven, several more retail stores, a Spanish flamenco themed restaurant, and several more offices before being capped by what was clearly a martial arts dojo called Sunzu. The mix of cultures was bizarre, yet seamless.
There was a second story extending across the length of the collection, displaying numerous round and rectangular windows – more offices perhaps. In the center of the building was a clock tower. It extended a story higher to accommodate a spotlighted, clock face with Roman numerals and black curlicue hands.
A large detached building on my right had the same Spanish Mediterranean styling and was clearly part of the overall collection. I could hear brass and piano driven jazz floating out of open double doors covered in blue leather. The words Blue Cat Jazz and the outline of a stylized feline were depicted in blue and gold neon above a large window, through which I could see an intimate darkened bar and dinner club – a spotlighted stage featuring a six-piece ensemble.
“Okay. Why are we here?”
“This is where I live.”
“Here? In a glorified strip mall?”
Pagan nodded. “Apartment on the second floor. And we prefer upscale collective to strip mall.”
“You say tomato…” I sniped simply to be caustic, but I looked around again – interested despite myself. “How did you find this place?”
“I helped build it.”
“What?”
“You’ve seen Field of Dreams?”
“What are you saying? Build it and they will come?”
“Exactly. The countess and I took a gamble on everyone who has a business here or a studio or an office…and they all took a gamble on us.”
It was my turn to sigh. My head was beginning to hurt as much as my leg. “Countess? I’m confused.”
“I can imagine,” Pagan said. He reached under his seat and removed a thick manila envelope. He held it out toward me. “Review this tonight. It will explain why I put myself into Siberia for two years. Meet me here at eight tomorrow morning. You’ll probably be even more confused, but I promise to explain further.”
I took the envelope and then opened the door of the Escalade, turning to slide out.
Pagan’s voice stopped me cold.
“I know who you are, Randall. It’s time to stop hiding.”
I turned to look back. I could feel my heart pounding, the blood coursing through my veins.
“I also know what you are,” Pagan said. His voice was soft, mesmerizing, yet his words were like hammer blows.
“Am I supposed to gamble on you?” I asked, dry mouthed.
“You don’t gamble on a sure thing,” Pagan said – and I saw truth.
Chapter 7
“Every violation of the truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but a stab to the heart of human society.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I’d stopped shaking by the time I drove the ten miles back to my non-descript apartment. However, as I unlocked the door and stepped in, it washed over me just how non-descript, anonymous, and bland the place containing my off-duty life remained. I couldn’t call it home because it wasn’t a home. It was a place where I slept – alone.
I moved in almost eighteen months ago after my last personal relationship went south, taking all my trust and self-esteem along with it. The only thing in the apartment to which I had any attachment was a collection of photographs and old cameras which had once belonged to my father – an Army combat photographer killed in the line of duty on his last attachment in Afghanistan. I was sixteen when the letter arrived.
My mother died a year later of cancer. We had three weeks between diagnosis and death. I finished out high school living with a family friend and trying to avoid the tentacles of Children’s Services.
Now I was twenty-eight years old, beat up emotionally, shot physically – figuratively and literally – a career on the skids, and precious few options. All my little pity party needed to be complete was a half-dozen cats.
I threw my keys on the kitchen table, plugged in the coffee maker, and moved into the bedroom. I still carried Pagan’s envelope with me, weighing heavily in my hand. I tossed it on the bed where it waited while I stripped, showered, washed my hair, and dressed in an ancient pair of gray sweats I still had from my time in the police academy. My name was stenciled across the front and rear of the shirt.
The sweats harkened back to a time when I could run a mile in under five minutes and break three hours in a marathon. Now, I had trouble walking up stairs. In the shower, I had gingerly washed the purple inflamed-looking skin puckering around the bullet’s entry and exit holes in my left leg. There had been some nerve damage, leaving the numbness which made walking difficult. It was ugly, and I hated it.
Toweling my hair dry and shaking it out, I grabbed Pagan’s envelope from the bed and went to get coffee. I didn’t want to eat, but forced myself to take a yogurt and a prepackaged salad out of the fridge.
I unclipped the envelope and slid the contents out onto the kitchen table. There was a stack of official reports topped by a DVD in a plastic case. I picked up the top report – a Preliminary Investigation Report of a murder from three years earlier. Alexis Walker, a seventeen-year old white female, had been found strangled and tossed behind a dumpster to the rear of the Barnes & Noble bookstore where she worked the coffee bar. The store was located in a busy mall on Roscoe Boulevard in Panorama City, a suburb of the San Fernando Valley covered by LAPD’s Van Nuys Area.
I scanned through the report, barely noticing the food I was ingesting. Michael Thomas Horner, another bookstore employee was quickly identified as a possible suspect. Several of his coworkers reported Horner had been fixated on Alexis, who had not returned his attentions.
Horner had been brought to the station and a call had gone out for Pagan to do the interrogation. I fe
lt queasy. I somehow knew this wasn’t going to end well. I ignored the rest of the reports, along with my makeshift dinner, opting to pick up the DVD – which I realized had to be a recording of Pagan’s interrogation.
I booted up my computer, which sat on a small desk in what passed in my apartment for a living room. When the screen came to life, I slipped the DVD into its slot. Within moments, the familiar environs of an interrogation room came into view – blank urine colored walls, a small scarred table in one corner, two hard backed chairs – all of it looking like a two-page photo spread out of House & Jail Magazine.
The individual I assumed to be Michael Thomas Horner slumped in the chair closest to the back wall, perfectly placed to be picked up by the camera secreted in one corner of the ceiling.
Horner was scrawny and unattractive. His long, stringy, brown hair looked like it had been hacked instead of cut. He wore a black Mortal Kombat t-shirt, generic jeans held up by a too long belt with a metal marijuana leaf buckle, and black combat boots sans laces. He sat with his arms wrapped around himself, his skinny legs twisted so they crossed at the knees and again at the ankles – dead meat for somebody like Pagan.
Pagan entered the room and introduced himself. He held out his hand, keeping it out until Horner responded by unwrapping one of his arms from his chest and presenting the hand at the end of it like a limp fish, accepting Pagan’s grip. The resolution of the camera lens was good enough for me to see Horner’s fingernails were long and jagged – all dirt and sharp edges.
Due to the camera angle, I could only see Pagan’s back and the top of his head. He pulled up the second chair in the room and sat down very close to Horner, still holding Horner’s hand.
“Michael, I appreciate you voluntarily coming to the station with the uniformed officers. You do understand you are not under arrest and are free to leave at any time?” Pagan’s voice was soothing, intimate, friendly – not the coldly professional tone of most cops who have watched too much television.
“Yes.” Horner’s voice held defeat and despite his affirmative word, I could see he didn’t believe what he’d just said.
Pagan was between Horner and the door to the interrogation room. I could tell from Pagan’s body language the only way Horner was leaving the room would be in handcuffs after Pagan had wrung a confession out of him.
I could pick up the falsehood in Horner’s statement. He didn’t believe he was free to leave, but the video and audio would say he did believe he was free to leave when it was played back in court. Legally, it only mattered what Horner believed – and he’d just admitted he believed he was free to leave.
What I saw, nobody else would see. My stomach was beginning to churn.
“How old are you, Michael?”
“Twenty-two.”
“And how long have you worked at the bookstore?”
“Two years.”
I Knew Pagan didn’t care how old Horner was, or how long he’d worked at the bookstore. He already knew. He was establishing a truth baseline based on questions Horner most likely would not lie about.
Pagan released Horner’s hand. Horner immediately began to pick at invisible blemishes on his arm. He fidgeted in the chair, which wobbled on an uneven leg, reminding me of my own physical shortcoming. Pagan had most likely shortened the leg himself – controlling everything going on in the room.
Ten minutes had passed in innocuous chit chat. Horner’s legs were still crossed, but he had unfolded both his arms and was running his nails along his thighs, sharpening the jagged edges. I sensed it was a comfortable habit. He was loosening up.
Pagan moved on.
“Who are your friends at the bookstore?” Pagan asked
“Don’t have no friends. Who’d be friends with me?”
Good question. Horner might be twenty-two, but he was clearly socially inept. He wasn’t mentally handicapped, just a very dim bulb – a goofball, with a skinny, pimply, awkward body, and greasy hair falling into his eyes. He was one of life’s unfortunates.
“How about Alexis Walker?”
I saw Horner’s eyes move rapidly from side to side as if looking for an escape. I was sure the tell hadn’t escaped Pagan’s notice.
“She’s nice. Talks to me sometimes.”
“Talk to you last night?”
“No.” The answer was immediate. Too immediate. He had anticipated the question, prepared his lie, letting it burst from his lips in an exploding mist of spittle.
Again, even watching the video, I saw the falsehood.
Pagan sat very still and quiet. Waiting. Horner’s chair skittered back and forth as he fidgeted. “She said, ‘hi,’ when I took out the trash,” Horner finally filled the silence.
“You take out the trash from the café area? I thought your job was to shelve books?”
“I take the trash out, too.”
“Do you only take out the trash when Alexis works the coffee counter?”
“No.”
Pagan sighed aloud. “Michael, we were doing so well, but I don’t think you are being completely honest with me now. It upsets me when you belittle yourself, Michael.”
With somebody like Horner, you keep using their first name, personalizing the conversation, working on emotions of friendship they don’t know how to control or understand.
“You’re a good person, aren’t you, Michael?”
“Yes.”
The original crime report stated Alexis Walker’s father had reported her missing when she didn’t return home after her shift ended at 11pm.
Two hours later, uniformed officers refereeing a dispute between two homeless men collecting aluminum cans had noticed her strangled body behind the bookstore dumpster. Her bra had been taken – a souvenir.
Responding homicide detectives quickly cleared the homeless men, and just as quickly established Horner, the store’s weirdo employee, as being seen skulking around Alexis’ car after closing.
The detectives were no doubt understandably upset when their captain told them to call Pagan. I was sure they believed they could crack an egg like Horner as easily as Pagan, but their captain wanted the clearance on his record and didn’t want to take any chances. Pagan didn’t miss. Get Pagan.
Detectives door-knocked Horner’s house and got him to agree to come to the station voluntarily. The second he was out of sight in a patrol car, the detectives had produced a warrant to search the residence where Horner lived with his father.
I watched Pagan, seeing him get ready to change focus. He held up what I assumed was Horner’s rap sheet.
“Tell me about the time you were arrested,” Pagan said.
“It was stupid,” Horner replied. I could see he was actually embarrassed.
Pagan gently shook the rap sheet. “You think being arrested for burglary is stupid?”
“It was kicked down to trespass.”
“Tell me about it.”
“What do you want to know? They made me mad.”
“Who? The people you burglarized?”
“Yeah. They was always messing up the store.”
Pagan looked at Horner. Waiting.
Horner uncrossed his legs at the ankles. I could see the urge to justify himself bubbling inside him.
“The guy was always coming in the bookstore, taking out books, reading them in the chairs and then not putting them back. It wasn’t just one or two books. It was ten, fifteen, twenty books – every day. I had to follow around behind him all the time putting the books back. He didn’t care.”
“There was somebody else, too,” Pagan said.
Horner nodded. “Yeah. A woman. She was always buying lattes and leaving the cups on the bookshelves. She left stains everywhere – didn’t care.”
“What did you do?”
A slight smile touched Horner’s lips. “I went into the guy’s house and moved everything around. I didn’t take nothing, just moved everything so he had to find it and put it back, just like he did to me.”
“And the woman?�
��
“I stored up a week’s worth of empty coffee cups and put ‘em all over her house.”
If Pagan was amused, he didn’t show it, not varying the tone of his voice at all. “Did you go through her underwear drawer while you were in the house, Michael?”
“No. I don’t do stuff like that.”
I saw the lie.
“Of course you do,” Pagan said. “I would have gone through her underwear drawer.”
Horner uncrossed his legs completely and looked at Pagan.
Bingo.
“You would have?” Horner asked
“Sure,” Pagan said confidentially, guy to guy.
With only two exceptions, there is nothing in the rules saying an interrogator can’t lie to a suspect. You can’t tell a suspect you’ll cut them a deal with the judge, and there is case law saying you can’t use the specific phrase, the truth will set you free. Any other lie is fair game.
I knew the quickest way to get a suspect to confess is to present them with what they believe is a socially acceptable manner to explain their behavior. Blaming the victim is one way to do this – a woman was asking to be raped because of what she was wearing…five year-olds can be sexually precocious…if the victim just hadn’t pushed the suspect’s buttons…
An interrogator doesn’t believe the justifications, but if a suspect believes they will be judged less harshly because of a lame excuse, they will confess more readily.
If Horner thought Pagan was an understanding kindred spirit, he’d spill his guts. I could see Pagan was lying – he wouldn’t have gone through the woman’s underwear drawer.
I, however, might have left dirty coffee cups all over her house.
On the video, Pagan was moving on. “You told the truth when the officers arrested you back then?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good, Michael, because I need you to tell me the truth.”
Horner had turned his face away, but his body remained open.
“Michael?”
“What?”
“I need you to tell me the truth.”
Pagan waited.
